Random Christmas Memories....
Mood:  happy
Now Playing: Best of Johnny Cash
Ah Christmas! It’s the most wonderful time of the year…yeah it is! I spent the Christmas holiday with the famn damily. We had a perfectly lovely time. For reals. Surprisingly. I know. We ate, we opened, we laughed, we played Oh Hell, my sister and I walked her Lab puppy, ‘Stinkerbell’ (AKA euphemism for sneaking off for a smoke) and we spoke of Christmases past.

Here are some of the holiday ‘gems’ that we remembered and reminisced about. Enjoy. I hope your Christmas (or other assorted Yule holiday or lack thereof) was bright…and full of good and shiny things.

Quality Control
When my sister was 8 or so the ‘rents got her the much-desired new bike with the highly coveted, uber cool banana seat. Oh yeah. Slick baby!

So it’s Christmas Eve and Pop was putting her bike together after he and mom had finished sucking back a few bottles of champagne.

On Christmas morning, mom noticed a box full of ‘leftover’ bike parts and my sister wasn’t allowed to ride it until Pop got it fixed. “She is NOT riding that bike Robert!”

We Like the Night Life Baby….
All of the kids in the neighborhood loved the Thompson’s Christmas party. It spelled a free for all for a bunch of long haired and semi-pimply adolescents.

Our parents were so fully tanked, laughing and smoking while we were running around perving forgotten glasses of booze left on the buffet table, in the bathroom, on the back porch, etc. surreptitiously combining them into one big drink and chugging it before a parent caught you. Sometimes you lucked out on the combination and sometimes, not so good. AKA The liquor version of a ‘suicide’.

It was also convenient for those kids who dabbled in cigarettes. My sister and the older kids could snake smokes from unattended purses and sports coats and no one caught on as the whole house was filled with smoke anyway (in a long ago time, AKA the 70’s, most everyone smoked and smoked everywhere—secondhand smoke not such a biggie and who worried about their kids smoking by association anyway?)

In a random way, I think it prepared me for college. Similar parties and all….

Dead Guy Clothes
My grandpa, Jamie, was the go-to guy in his retirement community in Scottsdale.

The widow Nelson needed her gutters cleaned? Gramps would whip out the ladder and get it done. Did the tangelo tree at the McGrath’s need a culling? Gramps was there. Saul dies in his sleep and you clean out the closets for the widow and keep his old clothes to wear for grubbies. Only problem with this thrifty Scottish, as we are, plan? Gramps was over 6’ tall and these clothes were all for much shorter gents. So the family referred to these too short cast offs as ‘dead guy clothes’. As in, any time we saw Gramps wearing them, we’d be all shades of “Gramps is sporting dead guy clothes today”. Needless to say, long running family joke.

It’s Christmas 1980 something. Calvin Klein, as modeled by the ever ethereal and hot in a rather disturbing jailbait kind of way, Brooke Shields. You remember: “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins”.

So mom buys Gramps a pair of Calvin Klein jeans so that he can wear them to grub in rather than the dead guy clothes.

Gramps uses his pocket knife to carefully cut the tape away from the wrapping paper, then folds it and saves it to one side fully intending to wrap next year’s gifts in it (and did by the by).

He opens the box and pulls out the new jeans and my Pop says “Oh my God! Calvin Klein died.” At which, we all burst out laughing hysterically.

Gramps carefully folded the Calvins back into their box. We never saw them again.

The Tale of The Hell Bell
Ah the joys of yute! It’s Christmas. I’m five. We’re trimming the tree. It is my year to get on pop’s shoulders and put the angel on top—boo yeah!

It’s all fun, games and Burl Ives on the stereo until I spot the bell. I remember it well. It was beyond cool. Metallic green, glitter…garish. Have you ever noticed how kids that age are attracted to garish like moths to a porch light? So I tell dad that I want to put the bell on top of the tree.

Pop, ever patient, explains to me that we’re going to put the angel on top. I reply “I want the bell.” Pop explains that it’s my turn and I get to put the angel on the tree. To which, I respond with little fists planted on my waist, “I want the bell!” So Pops got down on his knees and explained the importance of the angel and the symbolism between her and the tree top. I folded my angry little arms across my angry little body and looked Pop straight in the eye and said “Hell!” Ooops!

Next thing I know, I am airborne. Flying down the hall with the greatest of ease as my Pop had grabbed me by the arm and dragged me down to the bathroom.

Wooshe….grind, grind, grind. That was the sound the bar of soap (think LAVA brand here folks) made as it made its way over the lips and ground down the length of my teeth towards my non-existent tonsils as I sat on the toilet seat and considered the extreme, extreme, error of my ways.

Ugh! Double ugh! Giant sobs through the bar of soap. Tough to do—lots of spit. Tears coursing down my little face.

Mom came back, eventually, and removed the bar of soap from my very repentant little potty mouth and says “Oh honey, you should never have said that.”

I blinked back some tears and went to respond to her and blew a ginormous soap bubble instead….

What makes this story is that every year at Christmas, whoever unpacks the bell says “Oh look Meg, it’s the Hell bell” and everyone laughs their asses off at my expense….as usual….

Gotta’ love the holidays!