Episode 10: Holiday Traditions
In this festive conversation, Brent and Rob explore their cherished Christmas traditions, childhood memories of Santa, and the nostalgia that surrounds the holiday season. They share humorous anecdotes about family Christmas tree adventures, unique traditions, and the significance of ornaments. The discussion also touches on the experience of celebrating Christmas in warmer climates, the joy of holiday music and movies, and the meaning of Christmas in their lives today. Ultimately, they emphasize the importance of family and friends during the holiday season.
Links, resources, books mentioned:
Topics we are covering in this episode:
Christmas traditions evoke nostalgia and create lasting memories.
Family adventures in finding Christmas trees can be humorous.
Unique family traditions can evolve over time.
Ornaments can hold sentimental value and represent memories.
Celebrating Christmas in warm climates can feel different.
Holiday music sets the tone for the Christmas season.
Movies play a significant role in holiday traditions.
The meaning of Christmas shifts as families grow and change.
Quality time with loved ones is the essence of the holidays.
Transcript:
Transcript Disclaimer - May contain the occasional confusing, inaccurate, or unintentionally funny transcription moment. It’s all part of the show.
Rob: Hey everybody, before we jump into today's episode, we have a really quick announcement for all of you. Christmas came early here and gave us a tremendous gift at Midlife Circus for all of us at Midlife Circus. Apple has decided to feature our podcast, Midlife Circus, in their new shows section. To tell you how this is determined, Apple looks at a couple of different things. One is there's an algorithm that decides what shows they want to feature.
It includes how many downloads do they have, what does listener data look like, how long do people listen to the episodes. But for me, the most important thing Apple does is they actually have editorial ⁓ insight into the episodes, into the show. So there's a team of people at Apple that get together and actually look at the show and they look at the show's content. They look at the relevance, uniqueness and the production quality to determine if it is of a standard that Apple would want to feature. And we got on that list.
I got to tell you, it's so cool. Hundreds of thousands of podcasts launch every year and only a small handful ever get featured. We couldn't be more elated that we're part of the list. Golden Globes are now going have podcast as one of the award categories. And I don't know about you, Brent, for me, this is kind of like a mini–Golden Globe moment
Brent: I mean, I'm so excited for this. I mean, it is a true gift that we have been given. So thank you to the Apple Podcast team first and foremost. And more importantly, thank you to our listeners, because you made this happen for us. But I want to share a little bit of data from the Apple Podcast ecosystem that shows the impact on the Midlife Circus podcast. So our daily listeners are now up more than 1000%.
Rob: Wait , a thousand percent? Whoa.
Brent: 1,000 %
since launching on new and noteworthy on Apple podcasts, which is incredible. Our followers that regularly tune into the Midlife Circus podcast have grown over 500%. And somehow these conversations that you and I are having are now reaching listeners in over 55 countries worldwide.
Rob: That's crazy.
Brent: It's unbelievable. And all we can say is thank you to our listeners, because really you're the ones who made this happen for us. Thank you to Apple Podcasts. this validates a lot of the work that we're doing, and we're on to something special. So thank you again for being a part of the journey with us, and let's jump into today's show.
Lena: Remember when Christmas morning felt like pure magic? When the wrapping paper flew, the food never ended, and your family's weirdest traditions somehow made sense? In this holiday special of Midlife Circus, Brent and Rob unwrap their favorite rituals, past and present, from chaotic kid memories to grown up traditions that still make the season shine. It's warm, funny, and a little nostalgic, the perfect listen for the holidays. Before we begin, remember to follow Midlife Circus on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe on Substack to stay up to date with everything happening under the tent.
Let's step into holiday traditions.
Brent: Oh, there he is. Happy holidays, Rob.
Rob: Merry Christmas. Happy New Year, buddy.
Brent: Hey. Before we jump in today, we're going to talk a lot about Christmas. We're going to talk about the traditions that are associated with Christmas and how nostalgia can be grounding. Before we dive in, I just have to give the spoiler alert. We're going to talk about Santa.
With that being said, are you ready for this, Rob?
Rob: I dress for the part, man. Come on. I did more than just put on the hat. I got ready for this thing.
Brent: You are ready to roll.
Rob: You want to explain for the listeners what I'm wearing? Because Brent has on a Santa hat.
Brent: I've got a Santa hat, and I've got a T shirt that says make it rain with a little bit of fun behind it. You know, that's the Grinch with a red flannel. And, Rob, you have talk about your blazer that you are wearing right now.
Rob: Describe it? It actually is a full on suit that I have with matching pants. The pants don't quite fit right now, so I'm not wearing the pants.
Brent: Too much holiday cheer
Rob: for you. Bright red with snowman and Christmas trees. I bought this at Macy's, oh, must have been five years ago and wore it for the holidays when I was working and just to make people laugh. And it is the most obnoxious color red I've ever seen.
Brent: I think it's amazing. Well done. Happy holidays. So to kick things off, I have a really important question because I've never asked this to you before. So
Rob: when you
Brent: were a kid, did you stay up all night trying to catch Santa, or were you one of those that were a nonbeliever by age six?
Rob: I was the kid that sat up waiting for Santa. I was a believer for a long time. I had to be the believer for a long time as the older brother. So, yes, wait up, try and catch Santa. And then it pivoted to once I put two or two together, realize the reality of a Santa Claus, because I was the oldest, I got to help my parents participate in creating that environment for all my siblings.
So it was ring the doorbell because Santa's dropping off pajamas. My little sisters are taking a shower. I got to help participate with the, the Santa deal. And as long as I acted like a believer, I got presence as a believer. So that's actually it was a little bit more selfish for me to keep believing in Santa or at least demonstrating I believed in Santa because Santa kept delivering when I believed in him.
What about you?
Brent: I'm still a believer today. Yeah? Like, it's so fun for me. I was the youngest of three. I remember when I was really young, we'd go to church and do some sort of celebration at church.
And then on the drive home, I'd just be looking out into the sky, and I'd be like, is that Santa? Is that Santa? Is that Santa? And my parents, no, but keep looking. And I would be the one that would stay up forever and just I just I want to hear them.
I want to believe. And to this day, it's still something so fun to me to look back at that stage in my life and just know how much it meant to me to be looking. And, you know, you'd see a shooting star every once in while. You're like, oh, that's definitely Santa and the sleigh. So I loved it, and I encourage my kids to always be believers.
I don't know if that's working very well because they're now 20 and 17.
Rob: I think I'm deliver believing presents under the tree for your boys?
Brent: Oh, absolutely. You bet. Nice. When you're thinking back when you were a kid, how about some of your earliest or funniest holiday memories from, let's say, ages eight to 12?
Rob: The family tradition at that time that I go back and remember probably the most fondly and then the funniest thing is my parents refused to buy Christmas trees. They wouldn't buy them, and they wouldn't go cut them down. What my mom and dad did was they waited until Christmas Eve, and then we would drive around to Christmas tree lots and get, in air quotes, free trees because nobody else is going to get a tree on Christmas Eve except for us. And so we drive around. My mom would go out, get out of the car, pick out a tree for my dad to throw into the van inside the van because we didn't tie it up on the roof.
So it was thrown into the van. Then they drive to the next Christmas tree lot, and it was always bigger, better. Oh, is there a bigger and better tree at the next lot for my parents to grab and throw into the car? And we'd finish the night by picking up pizza and going home and decorating the tree. And then fast forward till I was a teenager, we moved to New York City, and my parents tried to continue the same tradition.
And we went to the Christmas tree lots, but they were empty. There was, like, not a tree to be found. And so they ended up having to buy one at the second year we lived in New York City. But that first year, I think it was a sewer tree is what I would call it. It was in a ditch on the side of the road next to the curb, had water all over it.
We had to carry it home. It wasn't the best tree ever, but it was a funniest memory of, well, my parents realized that years that they needed to start buying a tree in advance. After I graduated from high school, I don't know what the tradition changed to for my siblings. Now my parents go and cut down a Griswold tree out in the woods every year. Is it is their, is their new thing.
Brent: That is so fun, though. I mean, it was a family tradition.
Rob: It was.
Brent: We've talked in previous episodes that money sometimes was tight in your household. So your parents actually made it fun and made it They did. An experience for everybody with the pizza and getting out, finding the tree. It backfired one year. So One year backfired.
Yeah. Welcome to Manhattan. Right? That's a little bit different of a story in Manhattan versus, you know, rural Oregon. My parents, from a tradition standpoint, my dad owned a business where we grew up, and he used to have a really big Christmas party, and he always had these obnoxious outfits.
And he wore them every year to the Christmas party. And I actually loved going to it, but it was just his time to shine, and he just loved it. And so now
Rob: it's suit is represented what your dad
Brent: would do Yeah. It'll flashback. But it was super fun just because that was something that happened in kind of the earlier part of December, and that really would kick off the routines that we would go through as a family and all the things of family gatherings. And Christmas for us when we were a little kid was a pretty big deal, and my parents made the best of it.
Rob: Yeah. I love it so much. I actually did not continue the Christmas tradition with my parents getting the tree. I put the tree up, like, right after Thanksgiving as quick as possible so that season can last as long as possible.
Brent: Absolutely. Our family tradition is doing it right around Thanksgiving is when we put up the tree, and then we'll let it last till about New Year's. It's super fun. How about any unique, you talked about a bit of a tradition that your family had. Any other thing that was weird or different that maybe you guys did as a family or even to this day that stuck around?
Rob: So each year, I would say some of the traditions that we do are our own. So we created our own traditions, but then we're also really flexible. So we can travel and go see family for the holidays. Sometimes we're with friends for the holiday. We don't have a set thing that we do every single year.
We try to do on Christmas Eve baked lasagna, so I think I have a really good lasagna recipe. And so we make that now for home for Christmas Eve is maybe the big thing that we do. We do the movie marathon around Christmas Eve as well. So we start at Thanksgiving watching elf on the day after either the day of or the day after Thanksgiving, and it ends with Christmas vacation on Christmas Eve typically if we're at home. And if we're traveling, we'll try and catch them on a plane or something like that.
But not a lot of the traditions stuck around with us going forward with the exception of, I would say, a Christmas ornament every year. That's something that my parents started back when I was a baby, so I have an ornament that actually says 1976. So it would've been my first second, actually, Christmas, but it's an old Disney elf. I don't know which elf it is or actually a dwarf. Excuse me.
It's one of the old Disney dwarfs, and it has nineteen seventy six written on the dwarf in a felt pen. It's one of my favorite ornaments to pull out and put on the tree. And then every year, Tara and I get a new ornament that's representative of the things that we did that year that excited us. So this year, it'll actually be a narrowboat. We have a narrowboat ornament from our trip we did into Wales and England earlier this year.
And so we try and commemorate our adventures or something that we accomplished for the year with an ornament for that year. So each year we pull those out to put them on the tree. It reminds us of a great thing we did at some point in time.
Brent: Do you have some of those ornaments from when you were a kid,
Rob: or does
Brent: this still with
Rob: your mom? Oh, you do. Very cool. When I got married, I showed up in a box for our first Christmas as a new couple. I got
Brent: the box of
Rob: all of them. Now a couple of them are missing. I think some of them broke. So I don't have all of them. But I do have most of them as a kid, and then still my parents every year do give
Brent: us an ornament. That is so cool. I love that. It's probably fun for you to go back. My mom did the same thing.
She gave me some of the ornaments that I maybe made in school, but I love seeing the ones of my kids when they were young because it's just super fun Yeah. To see what they created. They have the same memories that that I do around some of the creation of ornaments. So it's cool that you guys carry that tradition on. That's fun.
Rob: We keep doing that one. Yeah. What about you? What traditions do you have or weird things that you do with your kids now that remind you of what you did when you were a a kid at around Christmas?
Brent: Well, one thing that I don't do now, but I remember very distinctly as a kid, my parents and my grandparents bought a little teeny condo on the Island Of Maui, and then my uncle bought a condo in the same complex. So I remember starting pretty young, maybe like six or eight years old, we would go to Hawaii every year for Christmas for the two weeks. I mean, for my mom, Hawaii was her ultimate place. Like, that was her happy place on the planet. So that was something that we always did.
What was fun and from a tradition standpoint is we would always have Christmas a week before Christmas. And the conversation in the household was, yeah. Yeah. We called Santa. He's coming early this year, guys.
We somehow figured it out. He's going to make a special he doesn't normally do this. Like, he doesn't do it for anyone. But for you guys, because you've been good, he's going to come early this year. And so he would come early and do the presents.
And it was always a trimmed down version because once we started going Hawaii, the costs associated with that was kind of part of the Christmas gift was to go to Hawaii, which was amazing. And then we had routines when we were there. And the one thing that we typically would do is we would go body surfing on Christmas day. And that was just because our place was walking distance to the ocean, and that was fun. And ironically, I was just talking to my brother about one year, it was so stormy on Christmas day.
My dad and my uncle were like, oh, we're still going. And I remember my mom was kind of like, are you sure this is safe? Oh, it's totally good. And this is how my dad operated. We're fine.
The waves were massive. And I remember going out there and it was a constant washing machine. We were getting tumbled and slammed into the sand so hard, and everybody would get up and be like, you alright? I'm like, yeah. I'm just a little dizzy, but I'm okay.
Let's just go again. And in today's day and age, that would be considered child abuse. I mean, it was so violently crazy, but that was part of the upbringing of my household. Like, let's just go for it. And then we would have the fun part of the ending of the day was we would have Christmas dinner together with my uncle's family, and my parents and my siblings and my grandma used to actually come with us a lot too.
And we would go to a local hotel that did this beautiful Christmas buffet, but it was always sold out. So how we got around that is my uncle would call and he'd be like, this is doctor Drever, and I'm just trying to get my family in for the buffet this evening, but I've got this very important surgery later that I have to perform. So is there any chance you can get us in around 05:30?
Rob: Every year it worked. Was your uncle a
Brent: doctor? No. He was in he was into real estate. So he somehow pulled it off every year. And we'd have, like, 20 people.
I mean, it wouldn't be a small endeavor, but it was super fun. But the place was hilarious when I look back at it because it was a little one bedroom, I guess, probably no more than five or 600 square feet. And we would make it work. When my grandmother would come, she would stay in the bedroom. It was a king bed.
My parents, I think, would sleep on the floor in there, or we would, as kids, would sleep on the floor and we'd pull out couch. So we had six people just kind of crammed in. And I can look back on that. There was never a problem with any of it. Right.
Nothing. Yeah. It was we're just going to have fun because my parents were always very, let's get outside. And inside is where we're going to sleep, but other than that, we're going to just go enjoy the outside. So from a tradition standpoint, that's what I experienced a lot as a kid.
Rob: So I got question for you, given that you spent Christmas in Hawaii for a number of years. Can you celebrate Christmas in a warm environment? So I grew up in a you know, it was always cold for Christmas. That's why I associate Christmas with. We live in the mountains.
Having Christmas that is a cold Christmas. Are you able to, like, get your head around a hot Christmas? Because we've traveled for Christmas and been in the tropics, and it never feels like Christmas. There's lights on palm trees. It just doesn't make sense to me.
Brent: I think that was a selling point for my parents. I think they're like, oh, no. We're going to have Christmas before Christmas because we're in a place that you have Christmas. What is some of the things that you just really enjoy during the holidays?
Rob: Number of things. I would say the start of Christmas music. So when you start hearing Christmas music, no matter when it is even if I start hearing it in October, I know our Costco has Christmas decorations up in October, one of the for the kind of really first songs of Christmas. I get excited for that. One of the things we started doing if we're in town is we actually ski to go get our Christmas tree.
So we hike through the woods with our skis on, cut down a tree in the woods, and then I carry it out skiing downhill with Tara and I and the dog, and we come home and decorate it that afternoon. So there's some of the new things that we started doing. So it's all the way from first Christmas music till taking down the tree and actually throwing it in the community bonfire for June. I think it's June. Is that what it's called?
The community bonfire that happens in January here in our town. Every little thing along the way. So Christmas music starts at our house in November. Actually, the day after Halloween is when we start playing Christmas music, and then it runs all the way through till just after the first of the year.
Brent: I'm with you right there. Like, I start the Christmas music. It usually for me is I have the SiriusXM in my car, and so I turn on the Holley station. That's like the warm up. And then once we get into the Thanksgiving time frame, you start seeing all the lights.
And one thing that's spectacular where we live in the mountains, being near nice ski resorts, is they do such a good job with the lighting. And so you go in there and it's just so magical. So we try to do that a little bit. And then, I like the movie side of things as well. So I start watching movies.
Sometimes, I'm I think I've narrowed it down to, like, the final ten days. I try to get one every night. But the challenge is I used to do it with my kids, and they're just so over it. And so I'm the only one who watches the movies. The traditional movie that we do Christmas Eve is Polar Express.
Still love it. So that's a good one. Elf is kind of the same thing. I like to kick off the holidays with Elf because it's just so funny. One of the things that, I did learn about Christmas Vacation is that I was so excited to watch it with my kids.
And at the time, I introduced them to probably they were like six and nine. Not a 100% appropriate for little kids. Few situations where I'm like, okay. Hopefully, they're just not paying attention. So that is, something learned.
But then the sledding when he puts the super slippery spray on the
Rob: The serial coating. It was serial coating. Yeah. The polymer.
Brent: That is something we always like, we should replicate that. That looks amazing.
Rob: And you got a great hill outside your house for that too.
Brent: We sure do. We sure do.
Rob: So what are your movies then? What's on your list of movies?
Brent: I mentioned Polar Express. I mentioned elf. I like the Santa Claus movies with Tim Allen. Okay. Those are always pretty good fun ones.
I do go back to this nostalgia side of watching Rudolph the red nosed reindeer, Frosty the snowman. I do like some of the newer ones that there's the one with Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds. That one's pretty funny.
Rob: Oh, that new one that came out just, like, two years ago. Yeah.
Brent: Yep. Eddie Murphy had one that came out. It was pretty good. So I like to mix and match it, but then I like to go back. I do watch the Christmas story, Miracle on 34th Street, I believe that one.
It is. Yeah. I watch those. So I watch all of them to kind of give a different but they just rope me in. I I love it.
I mean, I just turn on the Hallmark Channel. I'm softy that way. I just love watching the movies and just being a part of it and just staring off into space and, you know, just being a part of the whole experience. And one tradition I actually want to say that's stuck around outside of movies for me, it just rings a bell with me, is my grandmother had this really good recipe for sticky buns or cinnamon rolls. And she started making those probably for me, I mean, when I was born.
I mean, it was always a family tradition. It was the night before Christmas those were made and then we'd have them Christmas morning. So then my mother carried on that tradition. And then when my mother passed away several years ago, I actually found the recipe box. And this recipe's probably almost a 100 years old now.
And so I do that every Christmas Eve. Have you tried them before?
Rob: Oh, they are fantastic. I'm definitely looking forward to getting, you know, half dozen, a dozen of those this this Christmas. I like typically get one or two. Maybe I can sneak a couple more from the house this year. Those are fantastic.
Brent: But the weird thing about that recipe is at high elevations, I have a difficult time getting the dough to rise. I kid you not. Every year, I am up till midnight trying to get it done. I just can't get it to rise, and then I try different techniques. I've only been doing it for ten years, Rob, so I'm a slow learner.
But it's so fun to do. And my youngest son and I were just talking recently that should we do a batch over Thanksgiving just to start it out?
Rob: We're like, oh, you betcha. A sample batch. Do a sample batch over Thanksgiving.
Brent: Just to make sure we remember how to do it.
Rob: But I got a controversial question for you then. We were talking about movies. And I know and maybe we'll ask our listeners to chime in on our social media pages for this one. Is Die Hard a Christmas movie to you?
Brent: Last year, I googled the top, I think, 20 Christmas movies, and it showed up. And I was like, I don't see it. I'm like, I You don't? I see the time of year. It just takes place the same time of year, but I wouldn't say it's centered around Christmas.
But I don't know. May yeah. Obviously, you do.
Rob: It is for me just because it's the only violent Christmas movie I watch. I did a couple years ago, did take tear down with some old Christmas movies I remember as a kid. So you mentioned some of the most common ones. I don't think I'll get her to watch these two ever again. One of them was it was an old Hallmark movie, was the night they saved Christmas.
And it was a bunch of kids. Christmas was not going to happen that year, and some kids got to the North Pole, and they saved Christmas that year. If you go back and watch that, there's some old celebrities. I couldn't name any of them right now, but there's some old celebrities in The other one, and this is totally out of obscurity. I don't remember don't know if you know why I remember the name of this.
Emmett Otters Jug Band Jug Band Christmas special. It's an old Muppet movie, and it was we were watching it from our my iPad in the van on a trip. And I said, we got to watch this. I can't believe I found it. It's Emmett Otter's Jug Band Christmas, and it was not like I remembered it.
Little disappointing.
Brent: That's the hard part. There's some of those that I watch. I'm like, not very good, but it wasn't intended for a 50 year old man.
Rob: No. Not at all.
Brent: It was intended for much, much, much younger.
Rob: And it fit the time. It was in the eighties, so you could have gotten away with stuff like that.
Brent: Absolutely. How about your favorite Christmas gift as a kid that you can remember?
Rob: This is an easy one. I got a pair of atomic skis for Christmas one year. They were the red Atomic, so they came out, I think, the year prior. I've been begging my parents for a new set of skis for an entire year. My brother and I had identical skis, so I was the oldest.
My brother is only, eighteen months behind me in age, something like that. So a lot of the gifts we got were the same gift, just in slightly different sizes. And this was the first year I had skis that did not match my brother's skis, and they were a pair of bright red atomic. They had, like, glitter in the skis, so they were really flashy atomic skis. And I remember getting them as a gift.
They were hidden behind the tree. So similar to back you mentioned the Christmas story with the Red Rider BB gun was hiding behind the tree, open up all the gifts. I'm a little disappointed because I don't get the skis that I want, and my dad's like, hey. What what's that over there, Rob? You still you missed one.
And there was this bright red pair of skis hiding, you know, buried in behind the Christmas tree where I would have never seen them. So that that's the epitome of a gift for me.
Brent: I remember those skis, actually. Those are like a hot pair of skis.
Rob: They were the skis
Brent: to have. They were the skis.
Rob: What about you? What was your gift that you've received or you gave or what brings back the best memory for you there?
Brent: I think I must have been around 12 years old, and I was really into riding BMX bikes at the time. And I wanted this one bike, and I think it was a hutch bike, and it was just pure chrome, and the forks were pure chrome. And so what my parents did is they bought me the frame and fork, and my birthday is in February. So then they knew that they would probably could give me components for my birthday. And so I got to build the bike.
And that was actually really fun for me as a kid is I got the main components for Christmas. And then with Christmas money or money from grandma or whatever, got to, you know, buy the pedals and buy the cranks and tires and all that kind of stuff. So that was a really fun one that just kept on giving like, I loved that bike so much. I had it up until I was about, I think, 30 years old, and I just kept on bringing it with me, and I finally gave it away. It was so small.
Like, I got almost 12. So I loved that bike so much. There is and the pride of building it from ground up was just part of the whole thing. And I was one of those kids that I would get all the BMX catalogs and bikes and look at all the parts and do all my research and, you know, the mailer type stuff. And I just loved it.
So that was super fun for me.
Rob: So we've done some looking back, Brent. Let's look now. What, what does Christmas mean to you now or the holidays mean to you to you now? And what moments or feelings do you, do you get excited about this time of year?
Brent: I look forward to Christmas this year for a really important reason for me, and I'll get emotional most likely in this where I can already start to feel it, is my oldest son is a junior in college, and he is not going to come home for Thanksgiving. So this is the first time he's like, hey, I want to hang out with my friends, and he's going to do a Friendsgiving type thing for Thanksgiving. And so it's a very empty feeling for us in the household. Now we still have my younger one, but it's just once there were four, now there are three. And so he's coming home for Christmas.
And that is something that I just really look forward to, just to have the whole family together. And one of the traditions that I've done, my father passed away well over twenty years ago. And one tradition I always do, and it feels really holiday centric to me, is his birthday is on December 15, and I ski every year. You've been with me. I've skied every year on December 15, rain or shine.
Like, it could be crappy conditions. I will still go on the mountain because my father liked to ski so much, but it's part of a I rope it into the holidays because it's always ten days before Christmas, and I feel that nostalgia. So that's something I really look forward to. And I love today's day and age, I just love being in the nostalgia world. I love looking back as a kid.
As you were saying, you look back at the ornaments, and it's one of those things where I see all the ornaments from when I was a kid when my kids were young. It just is really fun for me. So that's part of it. And I just hope that there's just this whole ski season just has a lot of snow. That's what I want to That's all I care about.
I want to ski a lot. How about yourself?
Rob: For, for me, it's the people, whether it be friends or family. As you mentioned, we're going to be spending Christmas day with you, which I know we've done a handful of times. Of course, it'll be after we go skiing in the morning because Christmas morning is the best morning to go skiing. No one's on the hill until about noon, so we get the whole mountain because it feels like it to ourselves. So it's people.
I go back to the people, friends and family, people that we love. And, really, that season starts for us around Thanksgiving, and so either we're with family or with a really close set of friends. This year, they live in Arizona, and I have a matching not matching. It's a totally different looking Thanksgiving suit that I wear for that holiday. We started doing that a couple years ago, dressing up for the holiday when we'd have Thanksgiving together.
I showed up at one time with a big bow tie on and a nice, and a nice, pair of pants and jacket. That but, the holidays really have gotten a place to us, I'm guessing for most of our listeners. It's about the people we spend the time with. It's not about the gift. It is I love the memories, but the memories are less about the experience and more about the people that we were with during that period of time in our lives.
So now it's really how do we spend time and really devote quality time with the people that we love.
Brent: Absolutely. And that's a good way to wrap up our conversation today. I feel holidays are really fun to get together with people as you just described. It's fun to look, go down that memory lane, and what did you experience as a kid? What did you experience as a young adult?
What do you experience now in your midlife? Some of my friends now have grandchildren, and so they have that new energy that comes into play, which is a ton of fun. So follow those traditions. Have a blast. Be safe as always, and just enjoy the holidays.
So thanks for spending your holidays with us, and both Rob and I just want to wish you a happy holidays, and we'll see you soon.
Lena: That's it for this episode of Midlife Circus. Visit midlifecircus.fm for show notes, transcripts, and all the latest happenings. And while you're there, sign up for our newsletter on Substack. Follow Midlife Circus on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss your next great act. Quick reminder, the opinions and stories shared here are personal reflections, not professional advice.
This show is for entertainment and inspiration only. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you under the big top next time. Midlife Circus is a Burning Matches Media production.