Traditions

Jennifer started a couple of family traditions the last few years of her life.

One was a ugly purse gift. Several years ago, our Brother-in-law Ken Gray had purchased what is called a "box of crap" from a company called Woot (it is now part of Amazon, but when this started it was before Amazon owned them). Over the years, he has purchased several of these boxes of crap and has gotten some pretty cool stuff, but he has also gotten some let's say less than desirable items.

Anyway, this one particular year he got two hideous purses in one of his boxes of crap. One was blue and one was pink. Anyway he was not sure what he was going to do with them. We happened to be visiting them and Jennifer came up with the idea that she was going to give one of these to my sister Cindy for Christmas as a gag gift. So she took the pink one off of Ken's hands. Now you need to understand the purse had to be hideous if Jennifer was giving it away (She loved purses).

The look on Cindy's face when she opened it that first year was like one of those old Visa commericals. It was priceless. You could tell she was trying to be polite about recieving the gift but at the same time you could see the "You got to be shitting me" wheels turning in her head. Pink is not one of Cindy's favorite colors and the purse was hideous.

Anyway the tradition of giving the ugly purse started. Each year the purse would get passed on to another female family member. However something had to be added to the purse to make it even more hideous.

We did have a little crisis in 2019 when the purse mysteriously disappeared. It accidentally (or at least that is my mom's version) got packed into moms stack of gift boxes that are kept in the basement. Everyone looked high and low for the damn purse (kind of like the laptop) with no luck. We were afraid it maybe got thrown away with the wrapping paper the previous year. Then just by chance it was found when someone was looking for a gift box and all was good and the tradition continued and the purse continued to be passed on.

When we shared Jennifer's diagnosis with our families, my sister Cindy who had the purse for the year decided she would take the purse with her around to various locations and have her boys take a picture of her with it. I don't think my sisters boys were to happy to be seen with her carrying this purse. Her intent was to share these photos with Jennifer while she was going through Chemo to help cheer her up. Jennifer would have absolutely loved this.

Below is the last photo Cindy took with the purse at the Museum of The Rockies in Bozeman, MT just to give you a idea of what the purse looks like.

Another tradition Jennifer started in 2023, was the Dysinger-Sologub March Madness bracket challenge. Most of our families are not big basketball fans or even knew how to fill out a bracket. Most of the family decided to participate (we had a couple of holdouts).

Between Jennifer and I we helped the less knowledgeable members of the family fill out their brackets. We had some very fun discussions while filling out the brackets and some very interesting brackets. We would give out updates as the games progressed. Of course this year's tournament had some major upsets so some of those interesting brackets were looking pretty good for a while. Jennifer's oldest brother Mike ended up winning the challenge and was provided a small trophy for the honor.

She really enjoyed doing this and fully planned to do it again in 2024 making it a tradition. I plan to continue to do it on her behalf. Hopefully everyone will participate to honor her.