The Christmas Day Budge Channeled Gypsy

When the lead pic is Gypsy Rose Lee, you just KNOW this is gonna be interesting.

1675 years ago today, the still-nascent Christians first celebrated the Birth of Christ on Christmas Day; 1211 years ago, Charlemagne became the first Holy Roman Emperor; 945 years ago, William the Bastard took the crown of England; 235 years ago, Washington crossed the Delaware and defeated the Hessians; 193 years ago, the choir of St. Nikolaus Cathedral in Oberndorff, Austria performed “Silent Night” for the first time; 97 years ago, several groups of Allied and Central Powers soldiers spontaneously stopped the Great War to sing carols and play soccer; twenty years ago, the final President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned; fifteen years ago, child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey was murdered (probably by her psycho brother); and two years ago, a crazy Nigerian tried to use his underwear to blow up an airplane.

These were all extremely important, memorable events to be certain, but none of them can match the Christmas morning ten years ago today when my beloved Budge made her burlesque debut on the back deck of our new home.

See what had happened was, it was Christmas morning and the two of us had breakfast in the living room in front of our tree, then exchanged gifts with each other. We were supposed to be at Daddy and Teresa’s for Christmas lunch at noon, so about ten o’clock, Budge went to get a shower while I took some of my new presents out to my workshop. At the time, my precious Jackie Boy and Beauregard (better known as Beau and Jack) were in their primes and I hadn’t yet taken the initiative to have their little testosterone factories shut down. Both of them were jealous of me and had scrapped quite violently before.

Even if you don't save a life, you may save a trip to the ER!!

While I was outside, I dropped something — I can’t even remember what — and when I stooped to get it, Jack ran up to me. Beau must have figured Jack was attacking me because he set into Jack ferociously. They were snarling and biting each other around the neck and generally tearing each others flesh (and my nerves) to pieces. Now I have been raised around dogs all my life. One of my earliest companions was a full blood American Pit Bulldog named Queen. I know dogs and dog behavior and one thing I knew to NEVER do was to get between two fighting dogs.

Well, I forgot myself in my desire to get this fight broken up. Beau was on top of Jack so I reached to grab his collar so I could pull him backwards. Just as my fingers touched Beau’s collar, Jack whipped around and tried to latch onto Beau’s neck. Unfortunately, my hand and wrist happened to be in his line of fire. He clamped down on my left wrist with malice and forethought. Pain exploded in my hand instantly, but just as quickly as he had bitten down, Jack released me.

I looked down at my wrist and four holes were spouting bright red gouts of blood. I grabbed my injured wrist with my opposite hand and staggered towards the back door. I was bleeding like the proverbial “stuck hog” and I didn’t want our utility room looking like an abattoir so I opened the back door, leaving a bloody hand print on the knob, and called out to Budge to please come to my assistance.

Now my Budge is a pretty cool-headed person and handles most emergencies well; however, she doesn’t handle ME being hurt OR large amounts of blood very well. She walked out to the back door wrapped in a towel fresh from the shower with her hair wrapped in a second towel. I recall her words being “Honey, I’m getting ready. What do you wa — OHMYGODWHATHAPPENED!!” I asked her for a clean towel so I could wrap my bleeding limb. At this point, I figured she would pick a towel out of the hamper that was at her feet or, failing that, she would take the towel from her hair.

I was wrong.

Ironically, this is one of Budge's favorite movies.

I heard her scream “HERE, TAKE THIS ONE!” and a towel fell at my feet. It was a pink towel and somehow, through the haze of pain and adrenaline, I remembered the towel on her hair being blue. I looked up and there stood my beloved wife au naturel.  She had stripped off her body towel and was standing on the back deck in a deep frost in front of God and everybody just as naked as the day she was born!

I managed to strangle out, “Um, baby?” and she came to her senses with a jolt and dashed back into the house. For about fifteen seconds, if anyone had been in either of our neighbor’s yards or driving by at a proper angle, he or she would have gotten a SHOW! Oh, that was a sight.

Once I got the blood contained, we spent about an hour of Christmas morning in the Hillcrest Hospital ER. Miraculously, the bite had missed any vital tendons or arteries. I ended up with four deep puncture wounds that hurt like CRAP as the nurse flushed them with iodine. Then I got a morphine injection and that was about the last clear thing I remember for the day.

We made it to Daddy’s about thirty minutes late, but by then the morphine was in control of my mind so I spent two hours in a recliner in a doze. We left Daddy’s and went to Charles and Missy’s for Budge’s side’s dinner. Again, I spent the evening in a recliner as Budge related the morning’s events. We made it home about eight that night and I was finally able to give in to the morphine completely and I was GONE to see the Wizard, so to speak.

Because I had such a great night’s sleep, I was able to get up really early the next morning. Budge and I had a fantastic day shopping the after Christmas clearances. To this day, we call it one of our top ten days ever!

And to think, it all started with a dog fight and a strip show

Love y’all and Merry Christmas, everyone!

Have a great day and keep those feet clean!

I’m Dreaming of a white . . . Boxing Day?

Snow in the Southland is a rare commodity. Snow when people actually WANT it, like around the holidays, is nigh upon unheard of in these parts.

December 26, 2010

So, when the flakes started falling about sundown last night most of the grownups around me were just as giddy and giggly as the few children in attendance. Greenville County, South Carolina was experiencing the first white Christmas since 1963, according to our local weathermen.

The snow fell throughout the night and we were greeted by a blinding white landscape this morning. Of course, the Sun has peeked his head out now so what’s left isn’t likely long for this world.

Snow brings out a certain special madness among Southerners. We so seldom get a simple pretty snow that we aren’t quite certain how to take them when they come along. Here, our winter weather of choice is ICE. This region has been smacked by four big ice storms in my memory. The first big one I remember was in 1988. The Monday we went back to school from Christmas break, it started snowing and icing. We left school by lunchtime that Monday and didn’t return until Wednesday of the FOLLOWING week. We missed seven school days and got no spring break that year.

My sophomore year in college saw a big snow, too. I learned a very important lesson in that storm; education majors should not get into snowball fights with engineering majors — especially if said engineering majors have access to their engineering lab. Surgical tubing and some Gore-tex pouches will launch a slushball nearly 100 yards with enough energy to take a guy completely off a bicycle. The funniest part of that particular day, however, was the two foreign students from South Africa. They’d NEVER seen snow and were convinced the sky was falling and the world was coming to an end. After we bopped them with a few good snowballs and served both of them some homemade snow ice cream, they started to come around.

It was the ice storm of 2002 that caused the most damage of any winter weather I remember. We got three or four inches of ICE. This stuff had just enough snow mixed in for color. Ice isn’t like snow in any way shape or form other than being cold. Four inches of ice is HEAVY; heavy enough to bring down main power lines — the big boys on the steel towers, not just the smaller residential stuff. It decimated trees — especially pines and other evergreens that are soft woods and woefully unsuited for weight bearing. By the time the storm lifted, most of Upstate SC was out of power. Our neighborhood went five days in the dark and some of the more remote places, like Glassy Mountain up in Pickens, went a full two weeks without power. I saw crews from as far away as Alabama working on the lines. It was a serious mess, but ever since then, we haven’t had a major outage, mainly because all the trees and limbs threatening power lines came down in that storm!

So I hope all my northern readers will forgive me my excitement over snow. I realize y’all get more snow in a day than I’ve seen in my lifetime, but we don’t laugh at you when you can’t move in our July humidity, so you could go easy on us and our poor winter driving skills!

Now go out and have some fun in what’s left of the white stuff and when you come in, get those feet dried off and warm. I don’t want anyone catching his or her death over this Christmas break!

Love y’all and y’all take care

What I Want for Christmas

Today is Christmas and everyone who survived the rush and crush of people are gathered around trees or tables with friends and family swapping stories, opening presents, eating, drinking, and generally making merry. It’s been a common custom for people to exchange lists of gifts they would like to get from their significant others while children practice their penmanship on those all important letters to Santa. I thought that, in the spirit of the season, I’d like to make out a list of what I want for Christmas this year. Just for fun and variety.

I want to eat Christmas dinner at Papa and Granny Wham’s. I want Papa Wham to say the blessing — his blessing — the same one I can still recite in my head: “Father, pardon us of all our sins; we thank you for these and all other blessing, in Jesus’ name, Amen.” I want to eat Granny Wham’s bone dry turkey and her dressing that she never put onions in because she knew I hated onions. I want Granny Hughes’ English pea dumplings as a side dish. I want one of Aunt Nell’s cakes.

I want us all sitting around a huge table. I want Papa Wham at one end and Papa John at the other. I want Granny Wham to sit down and not walk around with the tea pitcher asking to fill everyone’s glass for the twentieth time. I want Budge next to me and Mama and Rob, Mama Lowe and Jessie, Travis and Dani, and Chloe stretching down from Budge’s side. I want Chloe to have a bottle of cereal held in two good hands. I want Daddy and Teresa, Nick, Keri, and Mason on my other side stretching up the table. I want Daddy to be holding Mason and genuinely happy, smiling and at ease instead of on a ragged emotional edge because of Vietnam rooted PTSD.

I’d say I want Mama and Daddy still together, but even my wildest fantasies have their limits. Also, wishing carelessly can reduce happiness as much as expand it. For instance, had Mama and Daddy not divorced, MAYBE some things in my life would have been better. Maybe not. However, no divorce would then mean no Rob. No Rob; no Baby Huey; no Baby Huey; no Dani and without them both I wouldn’t have my beautiful baby niece, Chloe. It would be the same story on my other side as well. No Teresa would mean no Nicholas; no Nick would mean no Sissy; no Nick and no Sissy would mean no precious baby Mason.

Unfortunately, Mason and Chloe don’t completely erase the pain, anger, and frustration of a busted up family and all the excess arrangements and holiday misery such a lifestyle brings with it — memory is a killing thing in that regard, but they DO give the pain, anger, and frustration new and happier context. They’ve given meaning to the madness. Having those two bright eyed centers of the universe giggling and laughing at the table make the tears worthwhile.

Then I want Aunt Judy and the family she’d have sitting next to Aunt Cathy and Uncle Larry and Blake and Zack and Ashley. I want them all sitting right across from me. I want Granny Wham sitting next to Papa Wham and Aunt Mary and Uncle Carroll sitting — happily — side-by-side next to Granny.  I want Aunt Polly, Aunt Nell, and Aunt Mot — The Three Sisters — sitting together. I want Shane and Ashleigh sitting together nearby. I want little curly-locked Gabriel sitting on his all-grown-up Uncle Scott’s lap.

I want Dad and Sandy nearby — and quiet for a change. I want Missy and Charles and Jackson and Harry somewhere close by. I want Richard, bright-eyed, unhaunted, happy and sober, sitting next to Ki-Ki with Ryken on his lap. I want my beloved Kayla with her mom and stepdad, PJ and O.J,. there with the boys and Celeste, calmly smiling, eating and talking instead of screaming and fighting. This is another case of wishing for wholeness would mean wishing away much happiness. In some convoluted “perfect world” Rich and PJ wouldn’t have divorced and Kayla would have grown up in a stable family, made excellent grades, and gone to a fantastic college on a soccer scholarship. However, if that were true, Budge and I wouldn’t have Ki-Ki and Ryken in our lives, so — as painful as the road my be — I’ll take the demonic with the divine and keep on keeping on.

I want Laura and Rachel and Jen and the rest of Budge and my Florida family sitting with us around the table. I want to sit next to Grandma Sims and ask her if Dad was always as stubborn and hard-headed as he is now!

I want Papa John to read the Christmas story out of Luke from Papa Hurley’s huge family Bible. I want Uncle Claude to pray for us all after the meal. I want Aunt Mildred sitting with him, calm and well. I want Aunt Betty and Uncle Raymond and Rhonda next to Granny Hughes. I want Mama singing Christmas carols (instead of hacking and coughing) with Aunt Lib and Big Granny while Papa John plays his guitar and Aunt Margie plays the piano. I want Jenny there with Bubba and Diane. I want Bluford and Chad, Connie and Gen all sitting together. I want Aunt Margaret passing around her biscuits with one hand while holding Uncle Leroy’s hand with the other.

I want Brooke and Smallwood, Daniel and the Sledzianowski Brothers, Angela and Christian, and of course, my buddy Tina all sitting near me. I want Coach Candler and Mrs. McCuen and all the rest of my Woodmont family sitting around the table and tree with us. I want Maureen and her 3 boys and Dr. O and his three girls with Lance and my District 56 family with them too. I want my “sister” Laura sitting with Cameron and Jacob, smiling and not worried about paying bills or being alone anymore. I want Erica sitting hand in hand with David, happy and satisfied.

I want us all together and happy one more time.

That’s what I want for Christmas.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Hug and kiss the ones you love today. Next Christmas might be too late.

Well Merry *bleep*ing Christmas to You Too, Jerk!

For 22 years, starting in 1659, our lovely Puritan forefathers banned Christmas. Now I don’t hold too much with Puritan beliefs. I’ve had enough commerce with modern day Fundamentalists (who are only a pale shadow of the Puritans!) to know most of their beliefs rest in the authority of men rather than Scripture. However, on this whole idea of banning Christmas — well, they may have been on to something. I just spent parts of three days at the mall with about 350,000 of my closest friends and I can testify to one irrefutable fact — a whole truckload of people would be better off mentally, emotionally, and financially if we just skipped Christmas.

Now, before anyone wants to skewer me as being a Jehovah’s Witness or irreverent towards Jesus’ birthday, let me get one thing straight. For those of you who don’t know, Jesus Christ was not born on December 25, 8 BC. The Gospels state that the shepherds were in the fields with their flocks. If you ever have the time, check out the Weather Channel for Bethlehem in December. Not all the Middle East is hot all the time. Suffice it to say neither the shepherds nor their sheep would have been out in the fields in December in Judea.

No, Christmas as we know and love (or loathe) it today is a pastiche of pagan traditions adapted by some early Christians to make their new religion more appealing to their pagan neighbors. They basically co-opted the traditional Feast of Saturnalia from Roman pagans and later on, when Christianity reached the British Isles, the Druids added a healthy dose of their traditional Winter Solstice or Yuletine celebration to the Roman underpinnings. Honestly though, I don’t care about the origins of the Christ Mass. Christ can be honored at Christmas just as much as people want to honor Him. Or not. Paganism has nothing to do with my musings on canceling Christmas.

I’d consider canceling Christmas because it has morphed from “Tis the Season to be Jolly” into “Tis the Season to be a Raging Douchebag!”

Face it, NOTHING brings the collective inner a-holes of society to the surface like the Christmas season. Starting somewhere around August these days we start seeing the first glimmerings of the tinsel to come. Then stores get fully decorated as soon as the black cats and witches hats come down for Halloween. Thanksgiving gets brushed off and then OMG!

It’s Black Friday and the world loses its freaking mind!

From the Friday after Thanksgiving until sometime around the first week of January, you take your life into your hands if you venture to within a mile of a retail establishment. People will SHOOT YOU over a parking spot at the mall. I have personally been given the middle finger by several little old blue haired ladies driving their stretched out Cadillacs around the parking lot of Haywood Mall like the Malachy Brothers and Pinky Tuscadero in a demolition derby.

The Bird — from GRANDMA! That’s what Christmas DOES to people these days.

If you want to visit a breeding ground for strokes and heart attacks, head out to the nearest US Post Office starting around the second week in December. I was in my local station last Thursday to pick up some stamps and this guy a few people back in line from me gets on his cell phone (I will refrain from my “cell phone in public places” rant) and starts pitching a fit with whoever was on the other end. He actually SAID, “I’ll be here for AT LEAST an hour because for some reason EVERY IDIOT in this town brought TEN BOXES to mail!”

Really?

And people accuse ME of going off at the drop of a hat! Dude, word of advice — buy a calendar and some Xanax! Better make it the PURPLE ones too, because you are BEYOND the orange ones.

What I don’t understand is WHY ALL THE FUSS?!

For nearly six solid weeks, the great mass of quietly desperate sheeple run around like AD-HD lemmings on meth buying gifts they can’t afford with money they don’t have to give to people they probably don’t like. Why? Men are forced at bayonet point to put up trees and string lights on those trees and many of those men resort to alcohol in an effort to deal with the madness of trying to make out the color of the one remaining microscopic fleck of paint on the tip of a boxful of artificial tree branches! Is it orange or brown! Makes a difference you know.

We won’t even TALK about the lights. I don’t have the raw numbers, but I’m nearly certain the three leading causes of divorce in America are fights over money, lack of communication, and STRINGING CHRISTMAS LIGHTS ON A TREE!

“YES, DEAR, I see the big gaping hole where we need more lights!!”

People don’t enjoy Christmas anymore. They can’t. The “retail therapy” pushers won’t let them. What should be a nice, calm time for friends and family has turned into a materialistic feeding frenzy! My two oldest nephews get more toys and gadgets and stuff at ONE family get-together than Wilson’s Five and Ten’s whole inventory when I was growing up. The push to keep up with the Joneses who don’t even know you exist has driven people to madness.

People will STEAL PRESENTS out of a car. That is almost, but not quite as low as stealing money out of the offering plate as it comes by (not making change in the offering plate, that’s different). I’ve just recently seen women get into hair-pulling, shirt-ripping cat fights over the last Elmo doll — WHILE THEIR KIDS WERE WATCHING!

It’s unbelievable! Folks get trampled to DEATH every year at Wal-marts and Target stores over a sale on DVDs or some such nonsense. A person’s life has become cheaper to society than a round piece of laser etched plastic.

I can imagine Jesus looking over this chaos that — once upon a time — used to be set aside to celebrate His birth and thinking, “Really, guys?”

So watch out for the bird-flipping grannies out there and if you MUST go out to a mall sometime in the next four days, PLEASE be careful! It’s a tinsel wrapped, tiny light strung jungle out there!

Love y’all! Keep those feet clean!