Giving Thanks for a Shotgun Christmas (Cigar Smoke 12-16-10)

Hello everyone this Christmas season. Or as we say here in the United States, hello everyone this holiday season where it would probably kill us if we said the word Christmas without some kind of qualifier. Yes, I can still be pissy during this time of year. Pissy knows no season.

By the way, do you think Muslims would protest if we said they shouldn’t celebrate Ramadan because it offended four people in the United States? Just wondering. We wouldn’t want to offend anyone.

I’m just going to write a shotgun column this time. Shoot from the hip or shoot from the lip. There’s just going to be some shooting, but you won’t know where it’s coming from. Duck.

We had a really nice Thanksgiving at our house. We like to celebrate an old tradition (as opposed to a young tradition) by all sitting down at the Thanksgiving dinner table and giving thanks for all we have, and then taking a brief pause to sample the wine and then wait to see who will be the first one to ask my two sons, Mike and Casey, who are 41 and 36, why they aren’t married yet. Man, it’s heart-warming. I get shivers.

We’ve been doing this for the past 10 years. And no, we don’t care about their feelings. At first, we just hinted at it, and we’d say, “Would everyone who is a normal person and is married please stand up.” And they would be the only two people sitting, and we’d point at them and mock them and laugh at them and call them sissies and they would just look at us and say something defensive like, “It’s my life, Fuddy Duddy Face,” or, “pass the gravy.”

We tried everything over the years. Becoming more vicious each year. One year my son-in-law, Michael, said that if you were an unmarried man over the age of 30 in Alaska, Eskimos would put your “sorry asses” on a raft and push you out to sea and shoot at you with flaming arrows dipped in goat piss as you drifted away.

And another year, my daughter-in-law, Anh, who is Vietnamese, suggested that in her country men who weren’t married by a certain age were poked with large sharp sticks with poison tips and when the wounds got all bloody and filled with pus the elders would walk over to the unmarried losers and hit them right in the nose with the butt of a rifle.

We all put down our wine and clapped.

Personally, I tried to use guilt. I’m pretty good at making my sons guilty. I’ve had a lot of practice. A couple of years ago I asked them if they could hear that sound. And they said,

“What sound?” I said, “The sound of your mother crying. The sound of the teardrops hitting the hardwood floor and splashing up as your mother sits on an old wooden chair with splinters in her semi-aging buttocks while listening to a Pat Boone record.” We’re still waiting for their response.

I’ve taken some pretty good shots at ‘em, too. I remember back in 2004 I asked them if they actually liked being with a different, young, beautiful, teddy-wearing vixen who used birth control pills, and not settling down and having a bunch of rug rats so their father could finally be happy with life and live out his few remaining single-digit years with the sound of little pitter-pattering feet to soothe his sick and dying soul. “How selfish can you be,” I yelled! “Still gotta a ways to go, Pops,” one of the losers answered.

This year, after exhausting our arsenal of fear and guilt, all of us married good people had a secret meeting to plan our strategy. We decided to insult their manhood and try to humiliate them and even traumatize them, if that’s what it took. The vote was 8-0. Of course, I was the one who had to implement the plan. Somehow Mike, the older non-married loser, got wind that something was up and he didn’t come to dinner this year. So I had to try it on Casey alone.

Excuse me, I started, “Would any so-called man who is not married yet and has erectile dysfunction problems please share them with us? We are here to be supportive, and we know with the right drug and an understanding mate, you can solve this problem. Would that unmarried person please stand up now, and we will call them Ed (as in E.D.) to make the conversation flow a little easier?”

There was a silence for a long time. Then the silence was broken. No, it was not by a tear hitting the floor. It was the sound of a ball of mashed potatoes hitting the forehead of a never-to-be grandfather.