You're listening to the Beautiful Mess podcast, your cozy comfort listen, and this week we are riffing about our favorite Christmas cookies to make every single year.

And we're updating you on our novels.

So two of our favorite subjects, cookies, novels.

And we're glad you're here.

Yay.

Okay.

So before we jump in this week, I think we have to talk about Wicked.

So Emma, she is the organized aunt.

Oh my God. Thank you for saying that.

And I am the good gifting aunt. And that is our two separate roles.

So she bought us Wicked tickets for opening weekend. And it was like a party.

It was at the Alamo draft house. Our small town for some reason has one of those. And it's great.

It's the best thing about our town. It's like the top five. Yeah. It's up there. And it's wonderful. And so she got us tickets to like a wicked opening movie party. And there was a person dressed as Elphaba as you go in. And then there was a costume contest, which do you want to tell them what happened? So, you know, and this was the middle of the day. Our showing was like a 2.45. So there was a lot of families. Because my kids came. Yeah. We learned, I learned a lesson when I took them to the Wizard of Oz play that started at like 7 p.m. last year. Yeah. So it was a lot of like families, younger kids, you know, because it was that time. I mean, there are all sorts of people there, but the costume party, it was a bunch of little girls who went down to the front when they called for them and they were all dressed as either Alphaba or Galinda.

And Marigold, of course, was dressed kind of as her normal self, but as Galinda.

She had an old Halloween costume on.

Yeah.

And they had every girl do a little twirl, and then people would clap. So by applause, they were the winner. And we kind of knew Marigold was going to win because she was the youngest kid down there. And I feel like usually that's kind of how, if we didn't have one of our kids down there, I would have just clapped for the smallest person. She's little. Because it's just, you know, what you do. It's just sweet. So anyway, Marigold won, and she was very proud.

She was very proud. So she got this, they call them popcorn buckets. So I noticed that the

Alamo, I don't know if it's like this at other places, but the popcorn buckets are getting kind of

unhinged. They are. It is like a, it's like a full toy. It's like this at other places, but the popcorn buckets are getting kind of unhinged. They are.

It is like a, it's like a full toy. It's like a Barbie dream house and they're like, you can put popcorn in it. I'm like, I guess. There's a tiny, I mean, you could put, like, if you made a bag of microwave popcorn, you could put like half of it into this thing. Like, it doesn't fit a lot of popcorn, but it does have a plastic,

basically Barbie on the outside of Ariana Grande and it has the wand in 3D, which is the best part.

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