It’s Friday, December 29, 2006, and we are in the last stages of our week-long celebration of Christmas. So far, everything has gone according to plan. Christmas Eve day dawned bright and beautiful. Misty and Sean had spent the night and were up early, anxious to begin opening presents. I got up at 5:30 AM to get out their stockings and light the candles and fireplace. I also had to start cooking. After we had gone to bed the night before, Sean had wrapped Doug’s big-screen TV in gold wrapping paper. I added a giant red bow; it looked really cute when Doug came into the living room.
Before we did anything, I read the Christmas story from Luke Ch. 2. Then we took turns pulling the things out of our stockings, taking lots of pictures as we did. We go in for stocking stuffers in a big way; Sean had bought gigantic stockings that are at least three feet long! The stockings were followed by the opening of the presents. There was one brief moment of sadness as we remembered how Casey always enjoyed opening his little doggy presents each year.
We quickly moved past that to open our own gifts. Sean was delighted with his large tool chest, and Misty got a corduroy jacket that she really seemed to like (and it fit!) as well as a new pocketbook, some pottery, and the Angel of Affection to add to her collection. Sean and Misty could not wait for us to open our gift from them. It was one gift which Doug and I opened together. It turned out to be the coolest remote control I ever saw for our new TV. This one remote controls the TV and all our components, every function, with just the touch of one button. That means we can put our other five remotes away! You program this remote by hooking it up to a computer and punching in the model numbers of all the components. What we didn’t know was that on the night we were out celebrating our anniversary, Sean sneaked over to the house and did all the programming for us. It was ready to go out of the box! I love that about Sean, the way he likes to surprise people in such thoughtful, generous ways.
I finished cooking while Sean and Doug played with the remote. We all got down to Granny’s house around 11:00 am. Granny was making her famous fried chicken, another great surprise, as she almost never does that anymore. Soon the rest of the family arrived and we had tons of delicious food to eat. We opened gifts and sat around watching football games the rest of the afternoon. That evening I took my mother-in-law over to my sister Mary Jane’s house to take part in her Christmas Eve celebration. We ate dessert, visited for a while, and went back home. Doug and I returned to our house to go to bed. The next morning, we got up and went to my sister Cindy’s house for my family’s big Christmas. Opening gifts was followed by another huge meal none of us needed to eat. Cindy’s ham was moist and delicious. Everyone had brought food to eat, and Mary Jane had apparently spent her time recuperating from surgery by baking every rich dessert known to mankind. After eating ourselves into a near-comatose state, we all went to sleep! When we woke up, we enjoyed playing with the new puppies, eight little retrievers.
Listening to Mama talk that day, I was reminded of another Christmas, a not-so-good memory. I think I was in my early teens that year. Before I get into that story, I must give a little background information. Mama and Daddy had some unseal friends when we were growing up. One was a man we affectionately called Doc, as he had been one of Daddy’s professors in the forestry school at UGA. He was one of the cutest, sweetest, most lovable old men you could ever meet, but he had one glaring fault. He could talk the ears off a jack rabbit. Now Doc had had an interesting life, and as a result, he had lots and lots of stories to tell. The stories were pretty good; it’s just that he never stopped telling them. Once he got started, you were his captive audience and you couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Doc and his wife Dottie became like part of our family, kind of surrogate grandparents. Doc may have been a little eccentric, but he was downright normal compared to his sister Dorothy! Dorothy was a little old German lady married to a full-blooded Mohawk Indian chief we simply called The Chief. He didn’t say much, Dorothy did all the talking for both of them.
Well, one Christmas, Dorothy got it in her head that she wanted to cook Christmas dinner for Doc and Dottie and our family as well. None of us were the least bit happy about disrupting our own traditional family Christmas, but Mama has made a lifetime career out of not hurting other people’s feelings, so much to our chagrin, she and Daddy accepted the invitation. We had never been to the Chief’s house before. The one thing I remember about the house was an enormous ceremonial kettle drum that sat in a bay window in the living room. It had actually been used in Mohawk religious ceremonies. I can still see the Chief playing the drum and chanting something unintelligible; we thought that was pretty cool.
What was not so cool was the menu for Christmas dinner – roast duck! Now we country girls had never had roast duck in our lives; we wanted our traditional ham. Then, when it was almost time to eat, Dorothy discovered she had forgot to turn the oven on! This delayed our dinner so long we were ready to eat anything, duck, buzzard, whatever. Dorothy turned the oven up high to cook the duck faster, so what we got for dinner was a duck that was black on the outside and raw on the inside, in other words, inedible. Still, we were starving by this point, so we tried to eat the side dishes. That day I discovered who holds the title for world’s worst cook ever. Nothing was edible! We were finally able to excuse ourselves and go home, and we kids told our mom that we never, ever wanted to spend another Christmas doing anything but our traditional family Christmas – and we never did.
Of course, we girls grew up, married, and had children of our own; then Mama and Daddy moved away. That has necessitated some changes in our Christmas get-togethers, and those changes have been the cause of some controversy, but that’s another story! What matters most is that we still all get together and have a great time. Now we are here in the mountains, waiting on my sisters and their families to arrive soon for more family time and to celebrate Doug’s and Brent’s birthdays. Party On!
