Christmas With The Animals

Right before Christmas, I was watching a special in which various celebrities talked of their favorite Christmas memories.

They had such great stories! Did they make them up? Because Christmas for me has always been a pleasant, but benign event.

Watching this show, it occurred to me that I would be a terrible celebrity interview. I’ll interview myself to demonstrate.

Today, we’re speaking with The Great Tibby about a few of his favorite things at Christmastime. What’s your favorite gift ever?

I don’t have one.

Nothing sticks out?

Nope.

What’s your favorite food at Christmastime?

I don’t have one.

Really?

Does coffee qualify?

Do you have any ‘Christmas gone wrong’ stories you can share?

It’s Christmas. What goes wrong?

What’s your most memorable Christmas gift?

Ah. That one I can answer. A shotgun!

(Interview ends quickly as apparently the network thinks the gift of guns from Santa is not where they want this to go.)

That .410 shotgun doesn’t qualify as my favorite gift - I sincerely don’t have one I can recall - but it sticks out as memorable. If you’re not familiar with this gun, it’s a ‘four-ten.’ And yes, there’s technically a decimal point in front of it.

It’s a smaller shotgun but a shotgun nonetheless.

At age 10 I was hardly close to being a man, but being old enough to have your own gun is a bit of a right of passage for a boy.

I was probably 7 or 8-years old when I started going rabbit hunting with my dad, my older brother, an uncle, several cousins and a pack of beagles.

I was taught how to safely handle a shotgun but was handed someone else’s second-hand gun. It was always a .410 one of the older boys had ‘outgrown,’ if you will.

Now I had my very own! But…

I hated rabbit hunting. Hated it. From the beginning.

So, while getting my very own gun! was a very big deal, this meant my Saturday mornings would be ruined for years to come.

We followed the rule of eating what you killed, and I liked eating fried rabbit (with gravy and mashed potatoes), so I didn’t object to hunting. But there was nothing about stomping through briar thickets in the dead of winter that appealed to me.

Nor eating a lunch of Vienna* sausages and soda crackers.

Nor getting outta bed at the butt-crack of dawn to participate in any of this.

I tried begging out. It never worked. I guess somehow it was ‘good for me?’

The shotgun memory came back this Christmas.

It was just past dawn, and I was already awake but still lying in bed Christmas morning when a single gunshot rang out.

Being on my wife’s family farm in rural South Georgia, I knew the sound I just heard was very likely that of venison being harvested.

Again, no objection. It just seemed like an interesting way to start Christmas day.

“Hon, I’m gonna go out and shoot me a furry animal, then we’ll wake up the kids, open some presents and celebrate Baby Jesus!”

I quit deer hunting many years ago after spending an absolutely frigid morning in a tree stand with my feet feeling like frozen basketballs and seeing nothing but a hungry squirrel foraging for acorns.

I have since given my rifle away.

The only animal involved in my Christmas this year was a white elephant.

I wound up with a light bulb that throws out revolving Christmas colors.

It came from Big Lots.

Whoever submitted it to the gift pile didn’t attempt to hide the fact they had been shopping at Big Lots. They also didn’t attempt to hide the $12 price tag, which I think is $2 over the family limit for white elephant gifts.

But it is far out, man!!

*Vienna. It has three pronunciations:
-vee-enna: the boys’ choir
-vie-eena: the sausages
-vie-anna: city in Georgia. We don’t say nothing right in Georgia. It’s perfectly acceptable to say you eat vie-eena sausages with ‘soe-dee’ crackers.