Lainey Seyler

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Before we really get into it, I wanted to apologize for the double sends last week. We had some technical difficulties.

Local personality

We all know about what to expect from a holiday parade. Santa and Mrs. Claus will be there; there's typically a marching band and some costumed carolers. Abbotsford's holiday parade has that, but the highlight of the central Wisconsin town's parade is a 25-foot-long Puff the Magic Dragon.

John Bremer, who died in 2009, came up with the float in 1975 and made it with the help of about 75 friends and neighbors. The float takes two people to operate inside and four people to steer through the parade route. Puff breathes fire (from two fire extinguishers) and his eyes light up.

It's too late to check out Puff this year, but Mitchell A. Skurzewski of the Marshfield Herald Times has the full story plus a video.

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The great outdoors

Winter in Wisconsin is long, but not even Mother Nature can keep Wisconsinites indoors all season. Cafe Benelux, a restaurant in Milwaukee's Third Ward, came up with a new way for us to entertain ourselves outside (sort of). It installed heated igloo-like tents on its rooftop. I wasted no time in setting up a reservation to check it out. Find out what I learned (hot tip: go to the bathroom beforehand).

What's on tap

Food and Drink reporter Dan Higgins and I worked on a story this week highlighting 10 things you'll find at a holiday gathering in Wisconsin. Sconnies love some interesting foodstuff (like pickled herring and cannibal sandwiches). But one cocktail in particular pops up around the holidays: the Tom and Jerry.

The hot beverage features meringue folded in with sweetened whipped egg yolks. That batter gets added to a hot water and rum mixture (and don't forget the warm spices). The drink is labor intensive, so much so that Bryant's Cocktail Lounge in Milwaukee only sells the cocktail this time of year and has a separate bar dedicated to the drink. Head there Thursday through Saturday evenings to try it.

Other things happening in Wisconsin

Wisconsin Ink

Do you bring your Wisconsin pride everywhere you go in the form of a tattoo? Share a photo of it. We'll feature it in the newsletter.

Patrick Casey loves the Milwaukee Bucks. He moderates an online community of fellow fans on Reddit called r/MkeBucks. Casey lives in Madison but got the tattoo at Body Shop Tattoo & Piercings in Appleton. It was part of a challenge on the subreddit. "Bucks in six" is a popular saying and hashtag among Bucks fans. JR Radcliffe has the backstory on that.

Casey explains:

Last year, I organized our community’s first-annual Bucks game meet-up. We came up with the meet-up idea kind of late in the season, so we didn’t have a lot of time to promote it. We wanted to do our best to make it the best experience possible for everyone attending. Part of that meant selling tickets for our group, as there are special experiences available for groups based on how much revenue they bring in from ticket sales. There were a few thresholds we wanted to reach so our group would be able to get on the court to take photos (some of them with Thon Maker, as it turned out!) and have some courtside players’ bench seats for halftime entertainment and player warm-ups.

To give those goals extra visibility and incentivize people to get their tickets by the deadline, I decided to put out a challenge to the group that if a certain number of tickets were sold with our group code that I would get a “BUCKS IN SIX” tattoo.

It ended up being close, but the subreddit came through and reached that goal. There were a bunch of people who wanted to give me an out, saying they wouldn’t fault me for not going through with it—but that was never an option in my mind.

Share your tattoo, and join the conversation about all things Wisconsin in our Facebook Group. Get in touch with me at lainey.seyler@jrn.com or follow me on Twitter, @lainey_seyler.

Lainey Seyler