Christmas should come every other year, I think. Every year is too often.
On the opposite year we should have Mardi Gras.
See how nice that would work out? We wouldn’t go crazy with exhaustion from celebrating.
Nobody listens to my ideas.
Last year, like every Christmas when the Gunches get together, somebody puts out a bowl of baby carrots mixed with Cheetos, so every bite is a surprise. It’s a tradition.
But this time, it wasn’t the only surprise. The snakes were the surprise.
I got to explain.
Everybody in the Gunch family got their own present-buying routines, so you can pretty much predict what you’ll get from who.
Ms. Larda always gives out stockings which contain aspirins, band-aids, foot fungus powder and stuff, so almost every medical emergency is taken care of for the year.
But she also gives out regular presents, wrapped up nice, and they are all perfect choices — even the ones for the grandkids — because she started shopping in July.
My gentleman friend Lust and I usually give Lego sets to the kids, Amazon cards to the teen-agers, and a nice bottle of something to the adults. Of course, I always give something special to Lust. Last year it was a bar stool with his monogram across the seat.
My sister-in-law Larva, who makes garden gnomes, always gives a gnome to each family — this year it will be probably be LSU gnomes — and little gnomes —- maybe Taylor Swift or Harry Potter gnomes to the kids.
My other sister-in-law, Gloriosa, will drive down to Canal Place and buy us each something too expensive to actually use.
My daughter Gumdrop will hit the Walmart and do the same thing, minus the expensive part.
But there is always the most suspense about what my brothers-in-law, Leech and Lurch, will come up with. Their presents all depend on where they happen to be when the idea of Christmas shopping occurs to them. Like if they happen to be in a hardware store, we’ll all get screwdrivers. If they are in a sporting goods store, everybody gets a golf ball. In a shoe store, shoelaces. Like that.
Last year they were in their friend Larry’s pet store that was going out of business. Which is why we all got snakes. Five snakes: one for each family.
They had each snake curled up in a white sweat sock tied with red ribbon at the top. My sister-in-law Gloriosa happened to be the first person to open hers and dump it out and start screaming.
Now that should have been a warning. Do not untie red ribbons on white socks. Do not dump out contents. But nooo. Everybody else immediately opened theirs and dumped it out. And everybody else immediately started screaming. So much screaming that it drowned out the “Charlie Brown Christmas Special” on the TV.
God knows what the neighbors thought. Probably that we were all drunk and trying to sing a Christmas carol with a LOT of high notes.
Ms. Larda has a dog and a cat. The dog, a chihuahua named Chopsley, ran and hid behind Ms. Larda, and the cat, Charmer, zipped up on top of the cabinets. Meanwhile, the snakes slithered here and there, and one even got up the Christmas tree.
Thank God my son Gargoyle got a way of keeping his head when the rest of us get hysterical. So he run around and found a bucket and fitted a round cushion on it as a lid. Then, with everybody cheering him on, he got all five snakes in there. The next day, Ms. Larda brought the bucket to the nearest pet store, Patti’s Pets. Patti says she is glad to take them. She has five mice that didn’t get sold on her special Night Before Christmas Sale. People just ain’t sentimental these days, she says. So she can feed them to the snakes for dinner.
Ms. Larda looks at the five little mice — Christmas rejects. They even got names: Mickey, Minnie, Jerry, Nibbles and Mighty Mouse.
“I’ll take them,” she says. “And their five little cages, please.”
And that’s how every Gunch family got a mouse the night after Christmas.
