Christmas Stories

I got a hold of Mom this evening after missing her this morning. Turns out it was a lot of miscommunication. Rose thought I was working until 6PM on Christmas Eve. Mom said she's willing to hold the dinner until 6, but not 7 or 8. She's tired and (rightly) afraid of what my sister Anny's 3-year-old son Skylar will do if he gets too tired and/or excited. I have to get a hold of Rose and see what she says; we'll probably work something out.

Other than that, it was a fairly quiet day. Spent the morning watching A Christmas Story. Boy, does that bring back a lot of memories. That's one of my family's favorite holiday films. It showed up a LOT on cable in the 80s and early 90s, and we never missed it.

- My stepfather's religion is "Ford." (He also follows "Kowasaki.") My mother's is "Grand Am."

- On one hand, I envied Ralphie's gorgeous white Midwestern holidays. We were lucky to get rain on Christmas Day in Cape May. On the other hand, it was nice to not have to spend the winter waddling to school.

- My stepfather claims to have actually stuck his tongue to a frozen metal pole (a railroad track in his case) and have gotten it off by moistening the area around his tongue. Of course, my stepfather is also well-known for his tall tales...

- I was besieged by Scut Farkases of both genders at Ralphie's age. I never fought (I don't think my mom would have handled it nearly as well as Mrs. Parker did), but I did do an awful lot of yelling.

- I actually picked up a fair amount of blue language from both parents. Mom's "tapestry of obscenity" is probably blanketing half the Atlantic Ocean by now.

- My siblings and I were generally careful about cursing around our parents. Ralphie should actually consider the soap thing to not be that bad. Dropping the "f bomb" around our folks probably would have gotten us spanked, or at best grounded with revoked TV/video game privileges for a month. (My folks grew up with parents who spanked them; they're not bad people, that's just how they were raised.)

- Before Mom finally got fed up with the needle mess in 1997 and bought a fake tree, Christmas tree-buying in my family was something of an adventure. On an afternoon after school in mid-December, the five of us (six after Keefe was born) would bundle up and jump in the car to look at various local lots. Well, Mom and Dad would look at lots and haggle over prices and argue over whether this tree would lose it's needles or that tree was the right size for the living room. My siblings and I would just play tag and hide-and-seek amid the branches. Between lots, we'd stop at a local restaurant and have dinner. (Wendy's in Rio Grande was a favorite when they had that cool salad/pasta/taco bar.)

- There's a space under the sink in the house at Maryland Avenue in Cape May where Rose and Anny would hide when they were upset.

- Mom probably would have taken one look at that leg lamp and said "NO." Or at the very least banished it to the den or a less-used room.

- Our family had TWO picky eaters, Rose and Anny. One night, Mom got so fed up with Anny not wanting to eat, she let her do the "How does the little piggy eat?" thing Mrs. Parker did with Randy...right down to Anny's face ending up in the plate. I don't know why Mr. Parker and Ralphie were disgusted. Rose and I were literally falling off our chairs laughing. ;)

- Mom usually made our teacher gifts, often a home-made ornament. They always appreciated it. Some of them later reported they had those ornaments decades after we were no longer in grade school. :)

- Our Christmas mornings were more organized than the Parkers'. Mom would pile each person's presents in a different place (usually the same place every year). Everyone would sit next to or near their gifts and unwrap them in turn, youngest child to oldest child. After all the kids opened their presents, Mom and Dad would open theirs.

- Mutant Reviews is right. You will never again, in this PC day and age, enjoy the beauty that is the Choir of Chinese Waiters.

- Though my family did venture out to dinner several Christmas nights (including for three years running in the early 2000s when Anny's then-boyfriend was a chef at the fancy restaurant on the top of the Marquise De Lafayette Hotel in Cape May), the closest we got to Chinese Turkey was gourmet Vietnamese spring rolls. (On the other hand, those spring rolls ROCKED. I could go for two of those right now...)

Work was steady, surprisingly not QUITE as busy as I thought it would be. (I figured the lines would be going half-way across the store.) It was no busier than on any other normal Sunday. Thanks to an awesome Eagles game (I didn't see it, but they did beat the New Orleans Saints) and nasty, stormy weather, many people probably opted for home or the malls. It should be far busier tomorrow.

The store also did it's gift exchange today. I got a lovely tan sweater that fits quite nicely and a really cute red and tan striped scarf from Denise, a fellow cashier. (The sweater will come in handy. I donated several sweaters to the thrift shop in October that were too big or didn't look right on me.)