Day: December 16, 2020

It Was The Best Christmas Day EVER

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RDP Wednesday: Festive

When I was eight, I got the best present in THE WORLD.

I got a bike, a beautiful lime green bike with daisies stamped on the frame, it had handbrakes and a gearshift- I even got a set of streamers to hang from the handgrips.

They were plain white ones, but really, they did look pretty cool.

My Dad and his cousin had put me and my sister and brother’s  bikes together and the amazing thing is, they had fun doing it- or they thought it was funny because I heard them laughing all night in the living room.

They dined on the story for years that they had all these ‘extra parts’ after they put our bikes together and  that every time they saw us zooming around on the street they sort of held their breath and hoped my Mom wasn’t looking.

You know, just in case.

Anyway, on Christmas morning we ran out into the living room and there they were –

honest to goodness two wheel bikes that were so cool and hip looking that I couldn’t believe they were ours.

There was a bit of a down side.

It had been snowing for three days so the roads were snowed and iced over, in those days there weren’t any sidewalks yet- and did I mention I had the Chicken Pox too?

So- it turned out my best friend Darren got a bike and the chicken pox and we decided to just roll our bikes out onto the driveway so we could at least see each other’s bikes and we PROMISED we wouldn’t ride them.

But of course we were kids and we had new bikes, so along with the bikes and the chicken pox we both ended up taking off on our super duper Christmas presents and we both ended up with a head full of bumps, I sprained my wrist and my friend twisted his ankle.

As we rolled and pushed and crawled our way back up the hill to our houses, it started to snow again and we were already making plans to sneak out again after dinner.

I was itchy, I was hurting in about a zillion places but me and Darren decided right there and then and we will maintain to this day that  that Christmas was the best one  ever.

 

 

Thus Sayeth The Ramones

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I was going to save this and post it closer to New Years Eve, but when I went over the song ” I Wanna be Sedated ” by the Ramones it also seems to work on the Covid-19 stay at home situation too.

So go on, laugh, sing, yell- and Hey Ho Let’s Go enjoy it.

amm

The Tree Demon

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Putting My Feet In The Dirt: December Prompt #5- Pumpernickle and Rye

Photo by Mateusz Dach on Pexels.com

My least favorite thing to do at Christmas was decorating the family Christmas tree.

Decorating the tree was my Dad’s gig and he was convinced that if I did as much as look at the tree a light would burn out, or it would tilt or that one of the ornaments that had been perfectly placed a second ago was now ‘all wrong’.

So I was allowed to hand him ornments, keep my mouth shut and for heaven’s sake whatever I did- don’t touch anything. It didn’t matter that I killed the tree every year and that I kept it from achieving perfection. I wanted to be there anyway.

I was the resident Christmas Tree Demon.

Maybe I started to get into my role as the reason the tree failed to reach the height of it’s Christmas Glory every single damn year or maybe I wanted to be part of the festivities desperately enough that I was willing to be somewhere I wasn’t wanted or needed.

I guess I assumed I was some sort of Christmas Oaf that couldn’t be trusted around the tree as it was coming together- unlike my cousin who broke ornaments  because she liked the popping noise they made and sang Shirley Temple songs and tap danced around the living room and the tree  until I was good and ready to stick her up the chimney and start a fire.

My Dad and anyone else that was there that day stopped what they were doing to watch her and they watched me too- you know, in case I tried to touch something I wasn’t supposed to touch.

One year my parents took me to their friends house and their four kids proudly lined up in front of their tree and their parents took a picture of them and told us the kids had done the tree themselves and wasn’t it great?

My parents were big on me minding my manners and for as much as they thought I couldn’t manage to decorate their tree,  they did expect me to know how to initiate and participate in conversations.

That’s right, my Dad wanted me to compliment a bunch of other kids for doing something I was convinced I was absolutley terrible at and had no hope of ever being able to do.

I looked up at the tree, it was lit up and it sparkled and it smelled wonderful because it was a freshly cut tree. The one thing that caught my eye were these lovely little glass acorns with fake snow spinkled at the top near the stem.

I would like to say what I said wasn’t said out of meaness, or maybe it was. Maybe The Christmas Tree Demon showed up uninvited because that’s what Christmas Tree Demons do.

I walked up to the tree and with the lights sparkling and twinkling in my eyes I said in childlike wonder, ” I’ll bet it was a really pretty tree before you chopped it down and killed it.”