A sweet, sweet holiday

Cupid, with his chubby cheeks and cherub-who-ate-the-bon-bon smile, would have approved of the way Molly and I celebrated Valentine's Day this year.
Molly set the tone by whipping up a batch of cherry pie cookies for her friends and generously offering Vince and me the misshapen but still tasty leftovers. Breakfast.
I picked her up from school and we headed over to the-little-shop-that-every-neighborhood-should-have, Wilmar's Chocolates. We picked up a Valentine treat for Molly's piano teacher and enjoyed a double chocolate meltaway because the sweet lady holding the sample tray said we could. Then we caught the eye of our good friend Rose, who left her post on the busiest candy store shopping day of the year to give us each a white chocolate covered pretzel and a little chocolate heart. After school snack.
After Molly's piano lesson, we cruised over to the-little-bakery-that-every-neighborhood-should-have, Simple Simon. There we chatted with the cheery Marion, a 78-year old marvel of energy. She slipped three chocolate cherry cookies into our order of mint chocolate chip brownies. Dessert.
We'll throw a little extra energy into our workout this morning as we digest all of those tasty treats. And we'll smile.
Because, while we salute a holiday that features chocolate, we know Valentine's Day means a little bit more. It gives us the opportunity to celebrate all kinds of love -- the kind you feel when you open a homemade card from your daughter, unwrap a bunch of tulips from your husband, read a kind Facebook message, hear a meaningful tune, hug an old friend, savor a sweet memory and taste a chocolate candy.
You have to love a holiday that's all about love.

Rose's heart really is this big!

Our neighborhood candy store. I was all hopped up on chocolate,
or I would have adjusted my flash. Bummer.

Marion is nearly 80 and her energy exhausts us.

Wander into this place and they'll offer you a
chocolate truffle. I promise.

Molly's cherry pie cookies. They were pretty difficult and she
swears she'll never make them again, but we enjoyed them.

Vince and I split this cast off. Delicious.

What so proudly we hailed

On four occasions a performance of the National Anthem genuinely, memorably moved me.
The first happened in 1991, ten days after the Gulf War launched. A Black Hawk helicopter flew over us as my sisters, my Dad and I made our way into Tampa Stadium. The well publicized fact that this would be the first Super Bowl to take place during wartime left my dad uncharacteristically cautious and he pointed out the nearest exits as we took our seats.
Then Whitney Houston's powerful National Anthem swelled through the stadium and took away both our breath and our fear.
Nearly 10 years later, in honor of my dad, our daughter Katherine sang the National Anthem at Lambeau Field during the opening game of the 2001 Packer season. My dad's number 77 jersey hung past her knees as she sang sweetly and with great concentration, an innocent 12-year old in the waning days of an equally innocent time. Two days later, 9/11 soberly ushered in a new era of patriotism and suspicion.
Katherine sang the National Anthem at Lambeau Field again five years later. She, like the nation she represented, had grown older and far more aware. Tightened stadium security made the experience more somber, and an adjusted NFL pregame routine meant the players stayed on the field for the song. The intervening years had brought respect for the anthem and the struggles it represents to a wary, proud nation.
Last year, my son Vinnie and fellow members of the Appleton North varsity choir sang the National Anthem before a high school football game. Players, fans, band members and statisticians gathered from all corners of the stadium and they sang in unison, young men on the cusp of military eligibility.  
All four of those versions of the national anthem resonate for their purity of purpose and honest interpretation of some powerful words and images.

12-year old Katherine sang during the season opener in 2001.
(Photo courtesy Daniel Kramer)

Same song, same jersey, but a grown up singer and nation.
.

Pre-game at Appleton North in 2010.
Photo courtesy Mike Panzer

From Burns with love and lang syne

Molly and I received our first fan letter yesterday and it came to us all the way from Burns, a small logging town in Eastern Oregon.
The town is named for national Scottish poet Robert Burns and we have visited it twice because Molly's Aunt Sharon, who wrote us the letter, lives there.
While we've had the pleasure of visiting Sharon and her husband Dennis in Burns twice in the past few years, we don't get to see them nearly enough. Fortunately for us, Sharon has developed a rare skill in this age of frenetic updates and text messaging.
Sharon writes letters.
Molly and I both enjoy the immediacy and wide reach electronic communication offers. We cheerfully cede countless precious hours to cyberspace and we post, chat and tweet fairly regularly.
But we also genuinely appreciate the printed word. And when it's hand written, we like it all the more.
Robert Burns is famous for his written words, especially Auld Lang Syne. When I first met Sharon 26 years ago, I found it fascinating that a girl raised in a cosmopolitan family right in the heart of Chicago would find a home deep in the Oregon woods.
Having been to that beautiful part of the country, and having grown to know and love the kindest member of a family that leads with its heart, we've seen that Burns, Oregon is the perfect home for Sharon.
And we'll take her cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.




Here are six of Molly's aunts, two of her uncles and her dad.
I've seen this picture many times in the past few years
and I just noticed that they are in birth order. Deep breath. And...
JoanDonnaCarolSharonSteveElaineVinceNancyJimmy

Molly is lucky to have 11 aunts. Here is a picture of six of them,
with Sharon on the far right.

Molly, me, Katherine, Grandma Mary Jane, Aunt Donna and Sharon.

Clyde Crashcup, his kazoos and Lombardi too

My Dad and his good friend and teammate Henry Jordan shared more than just a spot on an historic defensive line. They also shared a love of family and ice cream.
A defining moment of those twin loves happened on a Green Bay street more than 40 years ago. The two men walked with their wives and children after a trip to the local ice cream shop when a familiar car pulled up and out jumped legendary Coach Vince Lombardi.
"We're two grown men standing there in front of our children and what did we do?" Both men liked to tell this story. "We hid our ice cream cones behind our backs."
They painted a charming picture of a truly innocent time.
The players had Mondays off and our family took that opportunity to head to our favorite pancake house for blueberry pancakes (which may have explained my Dad's trepidation about the Tuesday morning weigh-ins).
In the summer after the Packers won their second Super Bowl title, we were invited by the Wisconsin Tourism Department to take a trip with the Jordan family to Wisconsin Dells. The beauty of that trip is that it not only offered both families an enjoyable vacation, it also produced a series of photographs we all treasure.
I recently ran across an article written in 1967 by my mom's good friend Gloria Irwin, wife of the legendary Wisconsin broadcaster Jim Irwin. In it, she profiles the Packer wives on game day. With their husband in Detroit, the ladies gathered in Green Bay to watch the game.
One of them proved to be a tough critic as the Lion's offense began to move the ball. Gloria writes…

"All right, you Packers, they're going right up the middle," Olive Jordan fumes.

The opposition scores.
"See?" she looks knowingly at the others. "You can't let up at all."
"Now Olive, give them credit," Cherry Starr soothes. "That was a beautiful reception and look how well he was covered."
Olive was not to be assuaged.
"I don't care if Clyde Crashcup and his kazoos were there. They had two plays right up the middle!"
Oh, you sound just like Coach Lombardi," Jackie Nitschke ribs.

I don't know who Clyde Crashcup and his kazoos are, but I do know that the Packers beat Detroit 27-17 that day.

Here's the whole gang gathered around Little Bo Peep. That's
me in the front. I have no explanation for my Dad's lack of shoes.

Suzanne Jordan sweetly makes a wish.

Two kids on a paddle boat while the rest of us look on.

Left to right are Mr. Jordan, Mrs. Lombardi and my dad.

And here's a more recent shot of my Mom and Olive.

We enjoyed our last few hours as Super Bowl champs

As Super Bowls go, Molly and I prefer the green and gold variety. We even considered a ski trip this weekend, so uninterested were we in Sunday's festivities.
But then we were invited to watch the game with some of the greatest Packer fans we know and we cheered up considerably.
Our friends created a shrine to Wisconsin athletics above their garage. The room, which they built themselves, has hardwood floors, reclining leather seats and a big screen TV, and we've had the great pleasure of watching a few important games there over the years. It turned out to be the perfect setting to enjoy our last few hours as Super Bowl Champions.
There is an art to watching a Super Bowl game when your team is not featured and, in the unlikely event that Packers are not playing next year, we offer you the following tips:

1) Text your husband's college roommate's chubby young neighbor Sal. Well before kickoff this kid, who lives in New Jersey, predicted the Giants by four. Next year, we're paying attention.

2) Find a charming spot to watch the game. We managed to get ourselves invited to a house that not only offered a fully stocked Packer soda vending machine; it also housed a pudgy baby and an entertaining three-year old. Score.

3) Don't kid yourself with the veggie tray and the sliced apples. You, like everyone else, will not pay attention to the calories you consume during the four-hour free-for-all and you, like everyone else, will spend more time hovering over the barbecued ribs and brownies than anywhere else.

It's never easy to watch another team walk away with the trophy named Lombardi, but we'll try to be gracious. Congratulations to the New York Giants and enjoy your reign as world champions.

We'll see you next year.

If the line-up wasn't perfect, at least the setting was.

Vince enjoyed some half-time entertainment with baby Patrick.

Lots of healthy color, but the big
hit is hidden in that crock pot. Ribs. Yum.

Badger, Packer and Brewer gnomes.

A specially made Packer rosary. We'll get
'em next year!

This blog's for the hog

Pure procrastination drove us to embrace the Groundhog nearly a decade ago and now we celebrate the little rodent with ridiculous devotion.
We send out Groundhog cards every year (a tradition begun one year when the Christmas season whizzed by and we realized we had not sent a single card).
We serve a traditional feast on February 2, which always includes brats (Ground hog -- it's gross but it amuses us).
Maybe you've heard of Punxsutawney Phil, the world famous groundhog/meteorologist? Well, I've actually driven through that town and stopped in the famous town square. In the interest of journalistic integrity, though, I must report that both Phil and the town with an unwieldy name in which he resides must have excellent publicists. On any day except February 2 in Punxsutawney, there's absolutely nothing to see. Really.
More than 15,000 people come to Punxsutawney on February 2, though, and Phil has his own website, Facebook page and Twitter account.
As celebrations go in this house, we take all comers. Fat Tuesday? Laissez les bons temps rouler. St. Patrick's Day? Sure and begorra, we'll hoist a pint and whip up a shepherd's pie (because corn beef and cabbage is not our favorite).
We had a bad experience one year with St. Blaise when we all got our throats blessed and almost everyone immediately came down with the flu, so we skipped that particular tradition this year. But we're all geared up for St. Cyril, patron saint of the dry witted, party loving Vince Biskupic senior. Grandpa Vince, who was neither German nor Irish, liked to celebrate St. Cyril because it fell in between St. Patrick's Day and St. Joseph's.
Winters can get long here in the Midwest (although, according to Wildlife Sanctuary Betty, the not-so-famous Northeastern Wisconsin groundhog, not too much longer).
Our best advice is to pick an obscure holiday or two and embrace them. And, if you can't think of one join us right here on March 14. Pie Day. 

We amused ourselves by adding
our ages to the card this year.

In 2009 we buried Vinnie like a groundhog.

Charlie went off to St. Olaf in this 2006 card.

The groundhog joined us last night for a taste of summer. We had
grilled brats, red potato salad and a crispy green salad.

With no football to watch, we took to the bed…races

We value many things here in Wisconsin -- a squeaky cheese curd, an ice cold beer, good friends and old fashioned ingenuity. On Kelly Lake last weekend, Vince and I enjoyed all four.
We joined our friends for the second annual Kelly Lake Bed Races, an actual event promoted by the Oconto County Tourism Board.
A brisk breeze blew across the lake, making us grateful for the protection of our blaze orange hunting gear and for the extra wind block provided by the similarly attired fans assembled around us.
Two iron beds with soldered handles stood parked at the base of a snow mound. Teams of four runners and one rider raced the beds to another large mound 50 yards away. Once the bed reached the far mound, the rider jumped off, climbed over the mound to retrieve a stuffed animal strategically placed there and returned to the bed with the animal. The runners then sprinted the bed back to the starting point.
If it sounds like an athletic event invented by two bar owners named Gary Vizelka and Arlas Ousloos, it was.
But the tournament involved some real athleticism. It quickly became apparent that the key player on the team was, ironically, the rider. One team had their scrappy little rider sit sideways with his legs hanging off the bed. Then, the runners jammed the bed sideways against the mound and catapulted the rider up. He scrambled over the hill and swiftly reappeared with the stuffed animal in his teeth.
The runners slowed as the tournament progressed and the double-elimination format nearly forced us all to watch the Jamaican Bedsledders face off against the Mattress Bed Burners three times in a row, which may have led to cardiac arrest on both teams.
But we thoroughly enjoyed our time at the Kelly Lake Bed Races and next year if the waning days of January find us with no football team to follow, we're planning to put together a team of our own.

I wasn't dressed right for our time on the ice, so I grabbed this
fashionable snow suit and wore it over my coat and jeans. On a
frozen lake in Wisconsin, blaze orange almost always feels right.

This all-girl team impressed. Look to the far right corner of
the photo for their fading opponents.

I had high hopes for the Jamaican Bedsled team, but they fell just short.

As you can see, this closet in our family's cabin
provided quite a selection of warm weather gear.

We capped off the afternoon with a trip to the cheese factory for
some beer cheese and garlic and dill cheese curds. Delicious.