Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

Author’s note: This entry got caught in some endless upload loop and I thought it had posted but apparently not. My bad. So. Some Christmas cheer a little late.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that Christmas time with the Hicks clan always rocks. Well, more or less rocks. Depends on your Scale of Rockage. Mine is probably a bit more liberal than most.

This year was no exception to the rocking. As Kevin said earlier this morning, “Each Christmas just gets better and better.” So says the man who scored a cubic arseload of loot for his new apartment. (I feel rather bad, too, since I realized later on that we really sort of lavished gifts on Kevin, and Cutter probably only got about half as much, which I KNOW isn’t the point of Christmas and all and I know Cutter isn’t curled up in a ball crying about it as we speak, but on some deep internal level I can’t help but feel like we’ve somehow demonstrated which brother we like best, which totally isn’t true at all. LE *SIGH*)

Today was simultaneously quietly relaxing and bursting with obnoxious fun. “Santa” left the family the new electronic edition of Life, which I’m now hopelessly addicted to (yeah, it so beats the little plastic pegs and crappy green “hills”), and we played it as many times as I could get people to agree to it.

Dad loves his lottery tickets, and after dinner, he brought out a stack for all of us to scratch and laugh over. Us kids ran out to 7-Eleven to redeem our tickets and score some cigars for a post-dinner bonding session on the back patio. Mom joined us for that while dad trucked upstairs to bed. He’s the only one of us who has to work tomorrow. Much suckage.

And wouldn’t you know it…we got through both Christmas Eve AND Christmas proper without any weird family spats. Best gift ever, if you ask me.

At the last minute, Kevin decided he wanted to leave a wang for dad to find. See, several years ago we made a cookie wang one night while baking candy cane cookies together (every year we kids get together to make candy cane cookies while our folks go out to Christmas shop for the evening). It was a nice, firm, pink one with solid balls and a well-defined head. I even put in some righteous veins, but they mostly disappeared during the baking process. Kevin decided to leave it on dad’s pillow. A couple of hours later as my dad was getting ready to climb into bed, we heard a shout and then a laugh from upstairs. Dad found the cookie and all was well. I assumed the cookie then got eaten. Until it made a surprise reappearance a few weeks later on Christmas morning, when dad opened up a random unlabeled package simple addressed “To Jerry” and out of the bundle of tissue fell a pair of pink cookie balls, the shaft and head still held firmly in dad’s hand. We’ve never laughed so hard in all our lives.

So this is why Kevin wanted to make a wang for dad to find the next morning. Unfortunately we didn’t have anything really malleable. We thought that perhaps the innards of a loaf of fresh sourdough would work, but it didn’t want to compact down much. So I suggested we cover it in tinfoil and work it that way. And voila! Tinfoil wang. We helpfully left it tucked amongst mom’s snowman collection on the coffee table, hoping dad would discover it while we were opening gifts in the morning.

No such luck. Mom and dad went downstairs long before we did and spent an hour or so reading the paper and enjoying their coffee in silence. By the time us kids came down, dad had found the wang and set it next to Cutter’s senior picture on the bookshelf. Which was a funny concept in and of itself. I made sure to get a picture of that. Of course!

And now we’re winding down…Dam has come over and him and Cutter are talking random nonsense about people they know. I’m quickly dashing this out so I can get them started on another game of Life. I’ve yet to win, but it’s the journey that counts. Or something. Right? Hm.

Merry Christmas, peeps. Keep your wangs warm!