I have lots of Christmas memories and have written them out in the past… but I though I would share some of my favorites over the next few weeks…
Yes, Jesus is the reason for the season, but let me tell you… these memories are the ones that keep me going…;)
Originally Posted December 17, 2007
If you’ve not guessed by now, my family is a barrel of laughs…at least to me they are.
And if you’ve not yet figured out that my dad is a simple, yet a little off the wall, he is.
My dad, as I’ve stated before, just doesn’t do the whole gift receiving thing well. He’s hard to buy for. He never tells you what he wants. Well, I take that back… he has a standard answer.
“Dad, what do you want for Christmas?”
“Just go to Sears, go to the Craftsman took aisle, close your eyes and pick something.”
Craftsman is my father’s brand of choice because they replace the tools if you break them… and that’s a good thing because Dad likes to use tools for purposes other than what they were intended for.
Despite the fact that he tells us this, it’s boring. It doesn’t bring joy to any of us to just follow those simple instructions and I think that there were only a few years that we actually did this for him. There was the year that we got him the tape measurer/leveler thing that he really liked but that’s the only thing that I remember.
Because my dad refuses to create a wish list for my mother she buys him things that she thinks he wants. He opens them, acts excited and then they go into the drawer of presents that he’ll never use.
After she bought him the third do-it-yourself golf ball monogrammer, that he’s never used, he finally said something to her about not wasting money on things that he wouldn’t use. (He’s frugal you know… so this bothers him. It’s wasted money. Forget that my mother was excited to give it to him and to see him open it.)
The following year, he circled a boatload of stuff in the Northern Tool flyer that came out shortly after Turkey Day and my mother, who likes to take things to the extreme, went and purchased every single item that he circled, minus the Engine Puller, because she wasn’t sure why he needed an engine puller. (We later found out that he wanted it to lift logs. I wasn’t lying when I said that my father liked to use things for reasons other than which the product was invented. But he’s smart like that.)
So Christmas morning, Dad opened all of the obligatory, “these are what I wanted to get you gifts” from my mother, the rest of us opened our presents and when all was said and done, mom sent my then boyfriend down to the basement to retrieve what Dad actually wanted.
He was surprised. He was elated. He also mentioned money and how she shouldn’t have bought every thing that he circled. Sometimes you have to be a little specific with my mom. But that’s why we love her.
Dad was happy that year. He had all kinds of things to add to his garage and shop. He played for days, weeks, and he had a child like grin on his face all the while scolding mom for spending all that money. She didn’t care, and truth be told, I don’t think he did either.
And then one year, Dad mentioned that Miss April was looking a little ratty. Now, this is no secret, so it’s not like my dad’s going to hate me for spilling this on the internet (although, perhaps I should’ve posted this one while Pastor Man’s computer was in the shop…). My father has a pin up of Miss April 1979 in his closet. It’s behind his ties and next to his 3 post cards of John Wayne (his hero) and a letter from me that I wrote to him when I was in the 8th grade.
He explained to us that Miss April has made many moves and was tearing and he’d like a new one.
My mother just shrugged it off. She doesn’t have a problem with Miss April, I’m guessing. It’s been a joke in our family for years. Miss April has been there for 25 years by this point in time. I’m surprised she didn’t get lost in a move.
I was living in Richmond at the time and on one of my visits home, Mom came and grabbed me and said, “Hey, I need your help on the computer.”
This is not uncommon. My mom loves the computer and loves the internet, but she always needs help with it. So I asked her what was up and that’s when she dropped the bomb.
“Your Dad wants a new naked woman for behind his ties and I need your help to find it on the internet.”
I could not believe that my mother just said that, let alone wanted me to help her.
But, with a grin on my face, I accepted the challenge.
At the time, we didn’t know she was Miss April, 1979. We had to go up and look at the poster in his closet to see what information we could glean from it. We knew she was Miss April and Mom said that she remembered that someone in Boot Camp gave it to him. Boot Camp meant she was pregnant with my brother, he was born in August 1979 so we started there. We jotted that information down, along with her name (that we got from the back interview part that was all handwritten with bubbly letters and hearts where there should be dots over the i’s.) And we headed to the office.
We googled Playboy centerfolds and found out that she was indeed Miss April 1979. We then went looking for where we could order back copies of the magazine.
Wanna know what we found? Ebay.
The magazine was listed in mint condition from a guy in Canada and I put the bid in. It didn’t take long at all and Mom was pleased. Her goal this particular Christmas was to not only surprise Dad and buy him something that he wanted, but to shock him because I know he never in a million years would’ve guessed that Mom would do this. (Neither did I for that matter. If anyone in the family would’ve concocted this idea, it would’ve been me, but I just never thought about doing this for my dad. Eew.)
Anywho, once we found the magazine, I told her that I would continue to watch the bid and make sure that we got the magazine and then she looked at me and said, “I wonder what that woman looks like now. I bet she’s old and saggy.”
So we spent some more time trying to find out what Miss April did with her life. Apparently, not much, because we never found anything more about her. We found alot about her around that time, but nothing now. We made up our own outcome for her and I think it made mom a little happier to know that in her mind Miss April did not look like the curly haired woman in the shower anymore.
We ended up getting the magazine for $1 plus shipping. Yes, for less than $6, we were going to make my Dad a very happy man.
I had the magazine shipped to my work. I had strict instructions not to let anything happen to his gift and I was afraid the vagrants in my apartment complex with abscond with my porn, so I had it sent to work. But I forgot that it was coming. (This isn’t odd for me. I order so much stuff for the holidays that packages just come and I forget what might be in them.) So, of course, this would be the day that I decide to open my package at the front desk so then I have to explain to everyone why I’m getting a Playboy magazine from 1979 delivered to work.
And when you tell people that you’re buying it for your dad, from your mother, they roll. As if no one in the world does this…. 
My mother was prideful in the fact. Many other men that she worked with didn’t believe her and when she finally convinced them that she had indeed bought this for her husband, they promptly awarded my father with the luckiest husband on the face of the planet title.
Oh, yes. My mother and I had way too much fun with this the entire season.
I arrived home Christmas Eve with the package in hand. I handed it to Matthew neatly tucked away in a manila envelope with the strict instructions to take it right in and give it to Nana. My father tried to bypass it and take it himself and I snapped at him. This isn’t something that I ever do, really. It’s one way to die, but not the way that I’d chose.
My mother works at a nursing home as a gereatric nurse, which means that she has access to all kinds of boxes from the adult diapers. Alot of our presents are wrapped in Depends boxes, and this year was no different. The last package of the day was a huge box with Dad’s name on it.
He shook it. He rattled it. He grinned from ear to ear with his obligatory smile to make mom happy. It was a huge box, about 10 times the size of the magazine. (My mom knows that we snoop and so she makes it as hard as she can to deter our thinking about what might be in the box.)
And then he opened it.
He looked in the box, pulled it up but not out, and grinned from ear to ear.
He looked at my mom and said “thank you” and then placed it back in the box.
Not wanting to end the moment so soon, I asked “Aren’t you going to show everyone what you got?”
He looked at me, again with the grin that I love so much, and said, “My mother is in the room and she doesn’t need to know everything.”
Just then, Mamaw, age 75 at the time, piped up and said, “Lookie here buddy. If you think I don’t know that your wife and daughter were scouring the internet to buy you porn for Christmas, you’ve got another thought coming.”
Yup, that’s my grandma.
Laughter erupted and later on that evening Dad proudly hung up the new Miss April behind his ties and next to John Wayne.
And again, we had a Christmas that we would never forget…and one that would set the precedent that nothing was off limits when it came to gift giving…
but that’s another memory for another post…
Until next time…
