IT AIN'T CHRISTMAS TIL SOMEONE'S CRYIN'.
When I first married into this family, they all gave each other presents. All 22 of them gave all 22 of them presents. That means that on my first married Christmas, my list was 22 names long and I hadn't even gotten anything for my own parents yet. Jay was an unpaid assistant coach at the University of Minnesota and I was a full time student, designing needlepoint in my spare time. Our entire Christmas budget was $13.00. It took many years, another in law and 20 more grandkids, but I finally convinced the Piv's to go all greed gifts on Christmas.
Of course, being Piv's they had to take it one step farther and make it competitive. Now we play that game made popular at baby showers, where you roll a dice and when you get doubles you may choose a gift from a pile of beautifully wrapped presents on the table. When everyone has chosen a gift, we all unwrap and see what we got. It's a lovely surprise to find out whether you got a forty piece drill bit set from Sears
or a size 4 left tennis shoe that has seen better days
.
That's when the fun begins.
Now when you roll the dice, you know what you're getting and all you have to do is take it from the poor sap who opened it. The best part of the game is that you never know which gift will take the fancy of two or three of the players. One year everyone wanted a Tony the Tiger cereal bowl set. It changed hands four or five times before the buzzer rang, ending the game.
Everyone wants to be the one who brings the gift that causes fights.
This year, a pair of rookies took full honors. Mr. and Mrs. Curry brought two packages to the game. One was huge and the other small. Both were beautifully wrapped. THe huge gift contained eighteen rolls of toilet paper. The small package; a collectable keepsake from the beloved Minnesota Twins.
In the last several years, it's been Josie who's cried, usually when her Uncle Tim steals what she wants from her. Uncle Tim wasn't here this year and thanks to the autographed baseball, courtesy of Mr. Curry, no one tried to take the poster of Capt. Jack Sparrow from her. No tears from Josie this year.
Different story for Uncle Steve. He had that baseball in his hands two or three times but when the buzzer rang the ball was in Jay's hands.
Steve wept.
The game was declared a huge success.
Later on, there was singing, dancing, several of us watched It's a Wonderful Life, then more singing and dancing. Over the course of seven or eight hours, the thirty of us went through fifteen lbs of chicken wings, four slabs of ribs and about six gallons of gumbo. We also accounted for two cases of two buck chuck, three bottles of Stag's Leap and two bottles of Korbel. The case of beer was almost an afterthought. We ate about four dozen Christmas cookies and over two lbs of fudge, too.
The only downside to the party came when Tyler, who had been away from home for four months, decided to re-establish his big brother dominance over little brother Zack. It seems that Tyler
immediately loses all judgement when he drinks. Zack is six inches taller and easily outweighs Tyler by fifty lbs. Three times over the course of the evening, I walked into a different room to find Zack sitting on his thrashing brother, holding his wrists to the floor.
"What in the world...?!" I demanded the first time.
"I got it under control, Mom." Zack calmly replied. "You can go."
"Don't hurt him unless you have to." I warned.
"I won't have to." He sighed, and nonchalantly letting go of Ty's wrists with one hand, he slapped his big brother across the head.
I went back to the party.
One by one, families started to leave, as some of them had far to go and many had plans to attend midnight Mass. Before Steve left, Jay made one more trade. After all, Steve is a much more devoted fan of the Twins than Jay and will appreciate that baseball as it deserves. Besides, after all that food and wine, we knew the toilet paper would really come in handy.
