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Christmas Day 2013 at Lake Havasu, Arizona…

Posted by on December 25, 2013
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This is a movie you don’t want to miss. Inspirational and heart-warming.

retro+christmas+tree+gfairyChristmas Day dawned bright and sunny.  We took a drive along the lake. The bright blue water looked as if a handful of glittering diamonds had been tossed on the surface. Absolutely gorgeous! We then went to see a movie: Saving Mr. Banks. It was special. It is the topic of this post. It was a perfect Christmas Day activity. See the movie! Rent it, see it in the theater…doesn’t matter. Just see the movie. It is truly heartwarming. It’s a true story. You will be touched.

Tom Hanks stars as Walt Disney, whose young daughters loved a little book about a magical nanny named Mary Poppins. He promised them that someday he would make a movie about the story, but it was 20 years later before he delivered. The author of the book,  “Mrs.” P. L. Travers, played by Emma Thompson, was extremely possessive about the screen rights to her novels. It was no easy task to persuade Mrs. Travers to part with her character. She was given script approval and it turned out to be an extremely lengthy and painful process. Every little word, every little detail was a point of contention. Disney himself was personally involved for all those years in getting Travers to “sign on the bottom line.” As you will learn in the film, his reasons weren’t all commercial. He didn’t pursue Travers all those years just to make another buck. In watching him explain to Travers what he wanted to do with her character and why, you get a chance to grasp what Walt Disney was about. And, you learn at the same time as Travers learned it, why it was so difficult for her to “let go” of Mary Poppins. You’ll be glad she did let go of her.

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Turkey dinner at home on Christmas Day, 2013.

For dinner on Christmas Day, I roasted a fresh turkey breast and we had cornbread stuffing, gravy, cranberry relish and fresh broccoli. (The green beans in the store were too limp..I wouldn’t buy ’em.) It’s a bit of a challenge to cook a real meal in our little kitchen, but I couldn’t help myself. I can’t remember a Christmas in the past 30 or 40 years when I didn’t prepare a big traditional holiday meal. This has been a really nice Christmas: A wonderful lake-front Christmas Eve dinner at a fine restaurant, a nice drive around the Lake on Christmas Day, followed by Saving Mr. Banks  at the local cinema and then a good home cooked dinner. Doesn’t get much better than that!

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