Christmas Gift Adventures

I've written before about my family's gift giving tradition, where my siblings and I shop for each other at the dollar store. It stemmed from the days when we had little money and a lot of people, and it allowed all the kids to be involved in the act of giving even when we couldn't afford elaborate gifts. It's a tradition that remains even while most of the siblings are now working and could afford more than a dollar per person, and it's become a bit of a game to see what kind of ridiculous things we could get for each other.

This year, since I wasn't going home for Christmas, I roped in two of my siblings to help shop for me. They told me when they went shopping for their own gifts, and I sent them text messages throughout the shop as if I could see where they were and could direct them to the right object.

For example:

"OH! That one's perfect, because it begins with N and Nathan's name begins with an N!"

So my sister hunted for around for an item beginning with N, purchased it, and gave that to Nathan for me. In this case it was a ninja mask.

One sibling told me what I ended up picking up for them, the other did not, so seeing them open it on Christmas Day via Google Hangouts was as much a surprise to me as it was to them. It made for a lot of laughter.

The other prompts I gave and what they yielded:

"Elizabeth told me she had a gift for Micah, but she didn't want to say it out loud. So go find her, and whatever she's looking at, that's what he wants." --> A reusable coffee filter. (Micah does not drink coffee.)

"Ok, now find Elizabeth one more time, and get whatever is BEHIND her. She's facing away from it because it hurts too much to look at it, thinking she won't get it. Boy, will she be surprised!" --> Italian dressing.

"Ooh, up there, the very last thing on the top shelf, on the right. That'd be a good gift for Bekah. Especially if you drew a tiny caterpillar on it. (Can you do that please)?" --> An empty red bottle, which wasn't so easy to draw a caterpillar on, so my sister drew one on paper, cut it out, and taped it to the bottle.

"I really have no idea what Joel wants, but one of his recent Facebook posts began with 'TLDR,' so that must be some sort of clue. What would you say is the most 'too long' thing in the next aisle over?" --> A shoehorn you could use while standing

"Oh, right there, Bethany told me she really wants that thing to your left. Even though it's kind of gross." --> A wooden birdhouse to assemble.

"What would you say is the MOST orange thing on that middle shelf? Dad would be happy with that, I think." --> An orange bag of dog treats. (My family does not have a dog.)

"At first glance you'd think that thing on the bottom shelf is what Mom wants LEAST, but it's actually what she wants most! She's just too embarrassed to say it!" --> A bag of Epsom salts.

"Definitely get Seth the fifth thing in that stack. Oh, and that round thing behind you! Those go so well together! What an amazing duo gift for him!" --> A large aluminum cake pan and a box of moon pies. (As far as gifts going together, it could be worse.)

The Jungle Book: The Movie Novelization, by Hannah (Approximately Age 7)

Recently my sister sent me a collection of stories she wrote when she was about ten years old, and it got me thinking about some of the gems from my collection. I was avidly writing stories as soon as I could read (and telling them even before that), and I had an extensive vocabulary, although rather an odd sense of when to use my big grown-up words.

One of my very favorite things I ever wrote was this, which was the beginning of a novel version of the animated Jungle Book movie. I'm not sure I was aware at this point that the movie itself was based on a novel or whether I thought that I could do better or just thought it would be a fun thing to write, but I definitely expanded on some characters and added some personalities...

So, without further ado, here is 7-year-old me telling you the story of, like, the first 3 minutes of The Jungle Book. (It initially had no paragraph breaks - I have added some in for readability.)

* * *

Once there was a golden, green, beautiful jungle. On calm days, it was a day for the wild beasts. If it was a stormy day, they looked forward to after the storm.

One day, a panther climbed back and forth between the lovely limbs. His black coat was as shiny as a new black shoe. His name was Bugeera, and he was responsible for a great many things. It was this day a new responsibility was found. He was leaping from tree to tree, not paying attention at first to the sound from the grassy bottom of the jungle. He was on a hunt for deer meat, a kind many of his kind loved.

He was returning with a fat deer, when he heard it. It was a soft sound, but- Bugeera could'nt describe it. He found out later the sound, a baby's crying and giggling. Bugeera climbed to a limb, lower than he usually would dare, and saw the child. It was a boy, or in the jungle, a man cub. He was the smallest thing, maybe abandoned by his mother, maybe fallen from a tree, maybe captured and dropped by a cruel man, but nevertheless, he was there.

Bugeera paid no attention at first, but then he looked again. His pity was appearing, and he thought, "I can not take care of this child! My wife and my two cubs are depending on me to take care of them! But- I know! Mrs. Wolf!" and he picked up the child, leaving the meat, and started in the dir- ection of the wolf pack.

The pack was, as usual, active and not at times. Meaty, Hunter and Gray Baby, the three boys, were learning how to hunt by there father, Rama. Carol, the daughter, and Dinny, the nurse, were cooking a stew for the meat.

Mrs. Wolf was the first to notice Bugeera. She smiled. "Rama, there is a visitor," she said, nodding in Bugeera's direction.

Rama looked, then ran to greet him. "My old chap, I have'nt seen you for months! What have you brought." He looked at the grass bundle Bugeera was carrying(he had wrapped the man cub up in leaves, so he should not freeze).

Bugeera said, "The lady is to decide," and wandered to Mrs. Wolf.

She said, "What, Bugeera?"

Bugeera slowly placed the bundle in front of her, and said, low, "A man cub. Yes, a man cub."

The pack stared at Bugeera like he was from Mars. Carol almost fell into the stew pot. Meaty, Hunter and Gray Baby started to spring on their father, forcing him half into the cave.

Mrs. Wolf said, "A man cub. That is a man cub? Why doesn't it have claws? Where is it's warm fur? I think that I shall throw this- " she got no further.

Rama roared, "Oh, honey! Why not examine him, and per- haps keep- him." he whispered.

* * *

And that's as far as I ever got.

Another Childhood Story, This Time in the Form of a Chat Transcript

I was in RinkChat and ended up telling another story about my childhood, confirming once again that I was an insane little kid. I figured since I recently shared the Queen Game story here on my blog, I should share this one as well.

Me: Now it is time to sleeeeeep.
Me: Wait. I have to tell a stupid story before I sleep.
Me: When I was a kid, one of the other games that I used to play with my siblings was this weird story about a girl who had some deadly disease called "double ornithosis" and the only way she could be cured was to have surgery.
Me: And my brother played the surgeon, who was CRAZY and had this weird sing-songy chant/ritual he would do as he fixed the girl.
Me: One of the lines was, "Here! Have a poison surgery!" (My 5-year-old brain's term for anesthesia.) This was then followed by him proclaiming, "I gave YOU the poison surgery, but I'M going to sleeeeeeeeeeep!" (Except he didn't ever really go to sleep, he just said he was going to.)
Me: And so when I said, "Now it is time to sleeeeeeep," that was all I could hear in my head.
LaZorra: You are awesome.
LaZorra: And bizarre.
LaZorra: And I love you.
Me: I really wanted to follow it up with the next line, which was, "Oh, let me cut you open!"
Me: But I figured I should explain before just exclaiming that I was going to cut people open.
LaZorra: LOL
LaZorra: OKAY MAYBE I AM RETHINKING THE HUG I WAS GOING TO GIVE YOU
Me: LOL
Me: LOL NO DON'T TAKE BACK MY HUG BEFORE I EVEN GOT IT
LaZorra: okay fine but please dont cut me open my boss wont like it if i come into work with no fingers
Me: Just to fully educate you on this story, the ritual ended with, "Sew sew sew sew sew sew sew sew!" because immediately after cutting the girl open, he just sewed her back up.
LaZorra: LOL LOL
LaZorra: At least it's not an *intrusive* surgery.
Me: And the ritual began with him chanting, "Doctor needs a surgery! Doctor needs a surgery!" even though he was the one who was supposed to be doing surgery on the girl.
Me: So now you know the whole thing. Someday I will actually sing it for you so you can hear how it sounds.
LaZorra: I look forward to this performance.

Some Stories From My Childhood

I re-shared this first story with my RinkChat friends this past weekend, then again on Facebook, and now I've decided to re-print it here, along with some of my other favorite stories about weird things I did as a kid. Because... yeah, I was kind of a weird kid.

* * *

We have this big black canning pot that we mostly used when cooking corn on the cob or popcorn for the whole family. When I was nine or so, I decided it would be hilarious to rename it, so I started calling it the "hot patch boiling pot." Somehow this caught on. Not only did my siblings all start calling it this, but my parents did too.

A few years ago, my sister Bethany, who was eighteen or so at the time, found out for the very first time that that wasn't its real name. "Wait, what? What's it actually called?" "A canner."

I kind of wish she'd never found out, because it would have been hilarious to see her try to purchase one as an adult. "Excuse me, can you tell me where the hot patch boiling pots are?"

* * *

I have a tendency to lie to my siblings if they ask me a question I don't feel like answering, because making up an answer is so much more fun than giving them the real one. However, I then usually forget that I did this.

When the Lord of the Rings movies first came out, I was watching them with my siblings. It was at the part where they were trying to figure out which way to go, and one person says, "We can't go (whatever way) because it takes us too close to Isengard!" Bethany (who was probably eleven or so) asked me what Isengard was. I apparently told her it was a theme park and they didn't want to get distracted riding all the rides.

Note that I don't remember telling her this AT ALL.

Five years later, she was rewatching the movies and suddenly yells at me, "Hey! Isengard isn't a theme park!"

"...I know?"

"You told me it was!"

"What? Oh. Um. I'm sorry."

* * *

Growing up, my family didn't have a lot of money to buy toys for us kids. We were also homeschooled. As a result, my siblings and I spent a lot of time making up games to amuse ourselves.

I must have been about six when I made up The Queen Game. At the time I only had two siblings, but I made them both play it with me, and then as other kids were born into the family, I taught it to them. And our friends. And our neighbors. I was twelve or so when my mom found us playing it one day and told us we weren't allowed to play it anymore, and my siblings and I were all very upset. Looking back on it now... I get why she was weirded out by it.

It was a 3-person game. Each person got to be either the queen, the prisoner, or the guard. (Guys were allowed to be the queen as well, but they stayed the queen rather than turning into the king or something.) The guard captured the prisoner, usually for picking the queen's flowers, and threw them into prison. The queen then came up with the three most disgusting things they could think of to eat (one creative answer that became a popular recurring option: "dried eggs with buffalo hair on them"). The guard took all these foods to the prisoner, who promptly rejected them because they were pretty disgusting.

Finally, the guard simply serves the prisoner chocolate milk. The prisoner drinks the chocolate milk, but it turns out it was POISONED OH NO and the prisoner dies.

In the final act of this game/story, the queen and the guard "freeze the prisoner into coffee" and drink them. This gruesome ending somehow made sense to me when I was six and then was never questioned once it was put into place. It just became part of the game.

I'm kind of surprised it didn't get shut down before it did. We played this regularly for six years before Mom told us we couldn't play it anymore.

The other game I created as a child that we played a lot was less gory and more silly, but it still had a dark ending. It was called Tanya and the Chocolate Pudding. The basic idea was that we'd jump off the basement stairs onto an air mattress, but there was a storyline involved. The air mattress was a giant vat of chocolate pudding, put there by a witch, and once you fell in the chocolate pudding, you became enchanted and never wanted to leave.

The name "Tanya" came from the fact that we would take turns being different characters from movies we watched all the time, and my favorite was Tanya from An American Tail and Fievel Goes West. Each character would approach the vat of chocolate pudding and accidentally fall or get pushed in, and then they'd be stuck in the pudding forever. So we'd roll around on the air mattress as if we were swimming in a vat of chocolate pudding, and then when we'd all fallen in, we'd get out and do it all again as different characters.

When we ran out of characters or got bored of the game, we'd end it. The witch pulled the plug at the bottom of the vat, and we all went down the drain, landed in her dungeon, and died.

As you can see, my appreciation of morbid storylines started young.

Gift Giving

One of my favorite traditions my family has is when we go shopping for Christmas gifts for each other. I have seven younger siblings and we've never had much money, so a tradition we started several years ago was that we kids shop for each other at the local dollar store. That way all the kids can get and give something affordable.

When most of us were actually *little*, it was easy because we were all super excited about the cheap plastic tiaras and generic crime-fighting action figures. Now we're ages 10-25 and it really, *really* does become the thought that counts. People give each other silly or joke gifts because the amount of people who actually seriously want something from the dollar store is getting smaller. (Also, a lot of people give candy. A LOT.) It ends up being much more about the process of gift giving than the actual gifts.

All the children are allowed to pick out their own presents for everyone. This had led to some fantastically strange gifts over the years. One time, one brother bought 3-foot plastic candy canes for every one of us. Another time, my youngest brother (maybe a year old at the time) got dog toys from two of his older brothers. There was the year the dollar store stocked plastic swords that made swishing sounds whenever they moved. We ended up with three of those swords under the tree, all making noise inside their wrapping paper whenever somebody accidentally jostled the pile of presents. My father narrowly escaped getting a Pirates of the Caribbean night light a few years ago, before that brother changed his mind. As I got older and realized there was nothing really left that I actually *wanted* for Christmas, the game became, "What in the world will the little siblings get me this year?" (It might be straws. Apparently the youngest this year was debating buying packages of straws for people.)

Ahem. To my sister Rebekah, if you've randomly decided to read my blog before Christmas, stop reading here, because I'm about to talk about what I got you this year.

So, yeah. My sister Bekah. I had chosen a gift for everyone else and couldn't think of what she might like. I was discussing it in the store with two other siblings and mused out loud, "Does she want..." I trailed off, but was reminded of an inside joke in our family - a home video that shows 3-year-old Bekah alternately speaking to and speaking as her imaginary friends. "Should I sing... Jingle Bells?" she asks, speaking for someone else, and then she switches voices and responds as herself: "Not yet!" I realized that when I said, "Does she want," it was very similar in tone to Bekah's "Should I sing," so I morphed the line into that quote: "Does she want... Jingle Bells?"

"Not yet!" my siblings both responded.

So, you know what? Bekah's getting jingle bells from me this year. Or, well, a doorknob hanger with bells on it. With that quote written on the outside of the wrapping. It is a ridiculous gift, but it's connected to a silly inside joke, and it will hopefully make her laugh. And that's kind of what our Christmases end up being about anyway.

So for those of you celebrating a holiday this month that involves gift giving, I hope you get gifts that make you smile and make you thankful for your loved ones.