It is that time of year again, “the holidays”, and let’s face it…they started with Thanksgiving. From now until “Superbowl Sunday” no meaningful work will be done by anyone except those who consider work life and life work. I suppose I’m one of those but I do enjoy the reward that comes as a result of me doing my life’s work. In other words, if I won the lottery, I would still do what I do…well for a few hours anyway. Still, when this season arrives, as my wife would say, to quote Strother Martin in “Cool Hand Luke”, “you gonna get your mind right!” Well, I’ve had thirty years to get my mind right and still find myself in the “ hot box” cause “what we have here is…”failure to communicate”.
My wife takes this time of year seriously and it usually begins with unpacking the attic. That’s where all manner of stuff “holiday” is located for eleven months. This takes two days and three fights as I threaten to have a yard sale and she gets all melancholy about fifty year old Christmas stockings in need of a good seamstress. I go up the ladder while she stands at the bottom and greets each piece of holiday cheer as though she were seeing some relative for the first time in ten years. If these pieces could talk I’m sure they’d be saying, “Please, not this again, just when we were getting comfortable up there…who wants to hang on somebody’s door for a month!”
She also thinks the holidays mean family reunion time and that’s great but when you’re sixty-three a lot of the family’s Elvis moment came and they “left the building” and the ones still here are oft times starving, too young to remember the ones worth remembering and in love with somebody who they bring to the holiday festivities, usually at our house. And of course there’s always the living relatives you’d rather not see in the first place who manage to “just stop by” for a day of eating and cleaning out the liquor cabinet. This is where I do the, “this ain’t no soup kitchen routine” which gets me in a lot of trouble, particularly if they happen to be on her side of the family. So I have to get my mind right or the holidays will be a time to remember for sure as “Miss Holiday Spirit” will remind me how I ruined another opportunity to watch old people drink, and young people eat massive quantities of turkey, watch football, sleep on our couch and turn the bathroom into a Nascar experience.
I guess it’s that male menopause I’ve been hearing about but for the last several holidays the pets we’ve had down through the years always seem to come to mind. If I recollect correctly, they only drank water, ate their own food, watched the animal channel, slept on the floor and most times used the bathroom outside. They were a great bunch of folks to have around and when I see them in family videos, dadburned if they don’t seem like family. There was old Chipper, the blond cocker spaniel, whose ears always got in the dressing when he ate out of his bowl. And Duke the Boston Terrier who would chase a squirrel up a tree trying to get Christmas dinner on the run. Or Deuce the hairless Yorkie whose idea of a good holiday meal was anything he didn’t have to run down to eat or whatever somebody would bring to his bed. They were my kind of folks. But, like ol’ ”Bring on the Eggnog” says, I’ve got to get my mind right. I would suggest flying to some exotic warm place but I haven’t had my “junk” touched in years and it looks like the TSA officers have their hands full as it is.
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