Posted 8:19 AM by ill
Another Christmas Come and Gone...

Well... We made it. Another Christmas has passed and we all seemed to go through it with out too many scars, physical or emotional. We ran around to all the different relatives and spent Christmas day dividing my time up between my father and my mother. I spent the morning with dad making omelets and opening presents with him. It was a nice morning without too much trouble. We got him a new pair of slippers and I chuckled to myself when I was reminded of the year when my mother received a new pair of slippers. My father, always being the pinnacle of thinking something through, decided it would be better to bite the tag off then walk the ten feet to the kitchen for a pair of scissors. While biting the tag he snapped his front tooth in half and sent it flying across the room. Ah... Christmas memories. Fortunately this year we separated tithe tags to avoid any further costly dental visits.

Mom's was nice. She had prepared enough food to feed a small third world country and let them come back for seconds. This was the first year in her new home and she put on a nice affair for us. Despite my wife's snide comments over my brothers expensive present to himself and my brothers bickering with our mom over the appropriate use of mats under area rugs everything seemed to go off more or less without a hitch. Even the gag gift to my brother worked nicely. I figure his wife has to be wondering what exactly she married in to, as his first gift was soap on a rope. The purpose of that was when he was around 15 I guess, he was allowed to open one present on the eve of his birthday and it just so happened to be soap on a rope. This devastated him and he has never let my mother live it down. So this year she thought it would be funny to get him one for Christmas... We laughed, not so much at the gift but at the flood of bad memories it must of brought back for him. Ah family. Now to help out and to never be out done. We had one more gift for him in the true spirit of ribbing him. He wanted a stud finder, why I don't know, but it was what he wanted. Now maybe you should have some background on my dear older brother. He is someone who takes a lot of pride in his appearance and, in all fairness, is really the better looking of the two of us (I got the brains). So we thought it would be funny to wrap up a hand mirror with the words "Stud Finder" printed on it and give that to him... I think he appreciated it more then the soap on a rope...