Jose Cuervo Christmas Cookies

1 juicy lemon
1 cup of water
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup of sugar
1 tsp salt
1 cup of brown sugar
4 large eggs
1 cup nuts
2 cups of dried fruit
1 bottle Jose Cuervo Tequila

Sample the Cuervo to check quality. Take a large bowl, check the Cuervo again, to be sure it is of the highest quality, pour one level cup and drink.

Turn on the electric mixer. Beat one cup of butter in a large fluffy bowl.

Add one peastoon of sugar. Beat again. At this point it's best to make sure the Cuervo is still ok, try another cup just in case.

Turn off the mixer thingy.

Break 2 leggs and add to the bowl and chuck in the cup of dried fruit.

Pick the frigging fruit off the floor.

Mix on the turner.

If the fried druit gets stuck in the beaters just pry it loose with a drewscriver.

Sample the Cuervo to check for tonsisticity.

Next, sift two cups of salt, or something. Who geeves a s....t Check the Jose Cuervo. Now shift the lemon juice and strain your nuts.

Add one table.

Add a spoon of sugar or whatever you can find.

Greash the oven.

Turn the cake tin 360 degrees and try not to fall over.

Don't forget to beat off the turner.

Finally, throw the bowl at someone you love with a spoon, finish the Cose Juervo and make sure to put the stove in the wishdasher.

Cherry Mistmas !

Choosing a Christmas Tree

All marriages and unions have certain arguments in common; with whose parents are we spending the -fill in the blank- holiday? In whose name do we put the car insurance? Do we want a dog or a cat? And, do we want a real or fake tree?

Younger people and men generally want the real tree. Older people and women, who have to take care of the younger people and men, gravitate towards the fake tree.

“Hey Mom, Dad and I agree, we’re getting a real tree. We’re going to the tree farm and chop it down ourselves, you know, a father- son thing.”
“Fine, fine..... take your father’s heart meds with him. Do you know CPR? Remember - if a father drops in a Christmas Tree forest and no one hears him, do you tie him on top of the car with the tree, or bury him where he falls?”
“Mom, he will be FINE! I’ll chop the tree. He can tie it on the car. I’ll help him.”
“That oughta be rich. You can’t tie the garbage bag ties, we have to get the drawstring ones just for you.”
“Why are you such a Grinch? Why do you hate real trees?”
“I love real trees, I hate that I’m the only one who gets under the tree to water it, and I’m always stuck with taking it down and dragging it half out the door.”
“Yeah - and how come you do that? How come you always jam it in the door halfway? Then Dad has to pull it through and take it to the dump.”
“And where are you while Dad is doing all this, huh? Watching from the window inside the house, drinking hot chocolate?”
“I’d help him it he needed it, he likes to do it himself.”
“Right. All parents prefer to do manual labor ourselves, it helps define the existential borders of our existence.”
“I don’t know what you just said, but you’d have no help at all if you didn’t have Brett and me.”
“What? You don’t help now! Everything is a negotiation. You guys don’t voluntarily do anything.”
“Well, maybe it was the way we were raised? Ever think about that?”
“More often than you know.”
“And Dad and I are tired of the same stupid decorations you put on the tree every year. We’re going to get all new ones.”
“Like hell you are! You’ll come home with fishing lures and little crab nets.”
“It’s better than those lame golden noodles that Brett and me made in First Grade that you insist on embarrassing us with every year. It bad enough that you put them on the tree, but you put them where everyone can see them and then you tell the same stupid story over and over about how there was a snow storm that day and our noodles got wet and that’s why some of the gold paint is missing.”
“It doesn’t matter what kind of tree we put up, the golden noodles go on!”
“Dad’s right! You’re impossible to talk to! You always whine about getting new decorations, and when we offer, just because you can’t pick them out, you don’t want them.”
“I cannot trust people who always look like they dressed in the dark to chose decorations that will coordinate with my color scheme.”
“Okay, just tell me the colors you want and we’ll only pick stuff in those colors, okay?”
“Mauve or a soft plum, sage, buff, and medium blue, but not a cool blue, a warm blue.”
“Pink, green, white, blue.... got it.”
“No, not pink, green, white, blue - mauve or a soft plum, sage, buff, and a medium warm blue. You see, you don’t know colors. Just let me get the decorations, all right?”
“Okay, so we have a deal, we get a real tree and you get to pick out new decorations and we burn the golden noodles.”
“The noodles stay.”
“Okay, the noodles stay, but in the back of the tree.....”
“Okay, Golden Noodles in the back of the tree, and you, your father and brother are responsible to water the tree and it goes out of the house the first weekend after New Years.”
“Tree goes out after the Super Bowl.”
“If the tree stays till the Super Bowl, the noodles go in the front, plus you sit next to your grandmother for at least one hour Christmas Day and talk to her, no watching TV from the corner of your eye, you have to make eye contact and conversation.”
“I was wondering why Dad sent me in to negotiate for a real tree. Guess I’m an amateur compared to you, Mom.”
“Honey, I had you at “Hey Mom”.”

When Christmas was Christmas

Well, here it is, a few weeks before Christmas and everyone is in a flurry of activity and anxiety to choose just the right gift. Was it really simpler when I was a child, or has time just eroded my memory?

Men, all men, either got a tie they didn’t want or a bottle of Old Spice. That’s all I recall the women in my family buying for their spouses, except for my Uncle Jimmy who was an Aqua Velva man.

Women got returnable jewelry from their men or some horrible black and red thing from Frederick's of Hollywood (but only if they were still very young). Once, one of my aunts got a football jersey, with her husband’s team on it of course. One Christmas, another aunt received a new iron from her husband for Christmas. I will never forget the look on her face as she opened the box and took out her new Sunbeam iron. It was the same look I’ve seen on the show “America’s Most Wanted”, the look the serial killer has before he reaches for the claw hammer. My uncle, clueless to the last, chimed in, “It has pulse steam.” Well, I know something was steaming that day, and it wasn’t the iron.

Christmas money went for the kids and dinner. We had real game back then that you could play right out of the box, no instructions or batteries needed. We had Rock Em - Sock Em Robots, Skittle Pool, Mystery Date game, and I always loved getting a jigsaw puzzle. Nobody got toys that needed batteries because that was a nuisance toy for the parent.

Naturally, we all wanted our parents to play with us, but by the time Christmas morning came, they were so burned out on us that they would force themselves to play with us for half an hour and then feign death on the couch. You could wrap their heads with paper and they wouldn’t even care. You could hide their cigarettes and they still wouldn’t make one move to stop you, that’s how tired they were.

One of my cousins picked the crumbs off the crumb cake on the coffee table right in front of at least seven adults and lived to tell the tale. That’s how you really knew you had them beaten to a standstill. Under any other circumstances, picking the crumbs off the Entenmann’s Crumb cake would have brought a swift slap to the back of your head. And this was in the day that no other adult would step forward to defend you from the child abuser, matter of fact, they got in line to yell or slap you.

Crumb cake etiquette was, and still is very exact, you may only pick your own crumbs off of your own piece. Crumb poaching is not allowed and has started many fights in many families. You didn’t want to get a reputation as a crumb poacher, because then everyone would keep an eye on you at all times, it was like being a drunk driver today. If you’ve gotten a DWI in the past, people watch what you drink at parties, unless you’re smart enough to drink before the party. Same with crumb poachers, best to eat some Oreo’s or Lorna Doones to take the edge off before the party so you aren’t tempted to poach.

Around noon, food would begin to appear. We had the usual fights about who could sit at the grown up table and who still had to sit at the kids table. The grown ups would eat and talk in code, spelling every other word as they spoke. Deciphering adult spelling codes created a steep learning curve for all of us. I attribute half my vocabulary to time spent trying to figure out what in the h-e-l-l they were trying to say. If they were spelling it, it was a curse word, or a really good piece of gossip, or worst of all - it was about you. There was no texting in those days, you learned to spell, or like a flattened fly, you got crushed between the pages of the dictionary of life. After dinner came the desserts, including whiskey cake and rum balls, and these were not dormant items. Our parents knew that the alcohol burned off in the baking process, so more whiskey was added after the cake came out to maintain it’s flavor. We were all allowed to eat rum balls and whiskey cake after dinner. And after that, I don’t recall anything but waking up the next morning in my pajama’s with a puck from my Skittle Pool game stuck to my face.