looking forward to a Sampiro Christmas story…?
Shit…I just wish he would invite me so I can watch it unfold in person!
It doesn’t have to be a Christmas story…any tale will do!
Where has he been? No stories for such a looooonnnngg time!
I edited your thread title, Canadiangirl, to make it a little less ambiguous for the folks wandering through the list of threads in MPSIMS.
Thank you, Skip…my apologies for the brain toot.
As Christmas approaches it would appear that Sampiromom and Sampirosis have gone from naughty to nice. Somethin’s gotta give soon though.
Aw, come on Sampiro! Please don’t make us beg!
Although we certainly will, in a pinch…
Let’s send him an inflatable Orlando Bloom doll. That should stir things up.
(Elf or pirate, though? Decisions, decisions…)
Children, I have heard your cries… unfortunately it’s already been established I’m a deadbeat dad.
There is this one that I’ve linked to in other threads and this depressing post and the nostalgia covered in this thread by me and others.
I’ve considered writing something called A Child’s Christmas in Weokahatchee to serve as the first chapter in a book I’m writing that’s to serve something like an opening chorus number (bring all the characters on stage), but haven’t really gotten the right angle on it. The fun Christmases were in the early 1980s (including my father’s last Christmas, 1981, when in order to keep him jovial my mother enlisted our help to keep him drunk [wasn’t hard] and it worked beautifully, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses contingent that was always there or the Aryan Nativity set, etc.). Or I’ve thought of doing an 80s compilation (which even though many of them were depressing they had their funny if somewhat evil moments [my senile wheelchair ridden grandmother trying to convince my brother’s neighbors kids to play the game she and her siblings to "play the game my brothers and sisters and I used to play when we were little- it’s called kill the n!gger", and of course one of his neighbors whose kids were playing there was black), but…
The family has usually done a good job of behaving on Christmas, which makes for not great stories. My mother made me and my sister put in writing that we wouldn’t discuss religion or politics during the holidays one time and that helped considerably. The Christmas after I came out was like the “two dates in the same night” episode because I split it between my mother and my boyfriend, getting calls from whichever one I wasn’t with whenever I was with the other, or the Christmas day we put 500 miles on a Yugo or whatever. Christmas when I was co-managing an apartment complex for the mentally ill could be interesting, such as when black carolers from a local church’s male youth class who didn’t know the apartment complex was “not like others” decided to collect outside the door of a resident who was both paranoid schizophrenic and a white supremacist. Other than for her leaning her head out the back window and screaming for somebody to “Help me! Call the cops! There’s a basketball team here trying to rape me!” (she was obese and 50 and horribly ugly- in other words just the type that black adolescents tend to lust after) it ended merrily enough.
I’ll definitely post something as soon as I decide on an attack angle. Til then Happy Holidays to all, and to all a Generic Seasonal Benevolence.
Yeah, you’re right…there’s not much there to work with. Maybe next year.
This is a spontaneous quickie that will be continued at some point. It’s part one of a recollection from the early 1970s. (My grandmother’s gifts really happened, as did the handshake relay and pretty much everything else contained.)
“Thank you, Grandmother.”
The look on Kathi’s face was enough, for me at least, for the gift to be truly memorable. Grandmother didn’t usually give Christmas gifts, but this year she did, to me and to my sister and my brother at least, and she gave them to us as she came in the door so we didn’t even have to wait until after Christmas Eve dinner to open them.
Kathi, being the only girl, got the most thoughtful and useful gift. It was half a container of Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder, wrapped in a newspaper and a rubber band. I was richer by one baseball sized clump of melted together vintage hard candies given in a paper grocery sack and my brother was the proud new owner of a slightly worn out pair of work gloves held together with a clothespin and with a bow on top stolen from one of the other presents under the tree.
It was the thought that counted. A widow for more than 25 years with nothing but her wide variety of pensions to fall back on, Grandmother only had a few dozen thousands of dollars to her name, and as she mentioned to us and in the letter to the editor that the Wetumpka Herald was nice enough to publish, “My boy came down and took my car away from me so I am unable to drive to the store of my own volition and effectively under house arrest on his good graces”.
My father had taken the car, a 1959 DeSoto, when I was about three and parked it in our side yard. As a kid it was my favorite playhouse. He had taken it from Grandmother just to make her his prisoner, and due to the fact that she’d run over a sliding scale of increasingly larger living objects over the past few decades, though she’d yet to top her all time classic of running over her alleged kleptomaniac octogenarian neighbor’s obese retarded daughter in said neighbor’s driveway a dozen years or so before I was a born. Grandmother still maintained that the accident was caused because the retarded girl “didn’t know enough to get out of the driveway when there’s a car turning a sharp 135 degrees at 70 miles an hour coming straight towards her”, and besides “Wadn’t no harm done- just her leg broke in a few places, good as new the next year, and wadn’t like she had to work or anything”.
Why Grandmother unexpectedly brought gifts with her this Christmas, ca. 1973, was a mystery. Perhaps she was just particularly in the Christmas spirit. I had been at her house when the carolers arrived in their old surplus school bus, the choir of a backwater black Holy Roller church who that year went all over the back roads of the county singing and taking Christmas dinners to the blind and disabled, which they believed Grandmother was, due to her age, and due to the fact she’d called and told them she was blind and disabled and could “use one of those free meals you give out”. It was a surprise to all of us, except her. That was also the first Christmas her sister, the lobotomized sexagenarian exhibitionist, celebrated with us, having just completed a 35 year engagement at Bryce State Asylum for the Insane where she’d enjoyed a free lobotomy and all the firehose baths she could ask for, and she was still a bit nervous as to her new surroundings, but the sight of two dozen black people disembarking from the old bus and dancing past the burning tired fueled washpots filled with water boiling for no apparent reason and into the overgrown yard singing loudly and harmoniously with a melismatic joyful noise, Christmas carols lyrically familiar to me but sung in a style I never dreamt possible or legal, did much to put Lucy into the Christmas spirit, and she even sang along for a few minutes once we talked her out of the closet.
That night, not quite a week before Christmas, a rotund she-minister from the Congregation presented my beaming Grandmother with two ham dinners and a variety of songs, before begging off with “We gotta get to the next house down the road, but before we go, we want to have a prayer widja!” to which my Grandmother joyfully responded “Please do Sister Preacher woman! I can goddam sure use all the prayers I can get!” and upon completion they were gone, the beautiful sound of their singing still audible when the bus was out of sight.
Perhaps it was this moment that put her in the Spirit and made her go shopping, which when it’s at the last minute and you’re limited to items found in your bathroom isn’t always easy. And she even fulfilled my mother’s advice of “You should always give Christmas presents that you like yourself, it adds a personal touch”. We know this because she told my sister “If you don’t use all that talcum powder let me know and I’ll come get it. That’s all I had and I’m out now.”
Meanwhile my other grandmother, Meemaw Mustang, sat across the den in the duct taped recliner, shaking hands with our female St. Bernard, BB, her choke collar (BB’s, not Meemaw Mustang’s) rounded with tinsel. This was one of the best Christmas gifts that could be given from one to the other. BB, though sweet, had the mind of a young cucumber- there are no telling how many countless man hours went into teaching her the one trick she knew, that of shaking hands, and so she proudly showed it off as often as she could and for as long as you would let her. Most people tended to get a bit bored with it after the first five minutes of holding her paw, patting her head and telling her “Good Girl” only to have her immediately drop the paw into their lap again and smile droolily again and again on a loop, but luckily for her Meemaw Mustang was in moderate to advanced Alzheimer’s and thought this was the most charming trick she’d ever seen, and evidently forgot having seen it before everytime BB dropped her pork chop sized foot to the floor and thus both were absolutely delighted anew whenever the foot went back into her lap and Meemaw raised it up again, smiling, stopping only long enough to spit her snuff into the Folger’s can that she’d had enough faculty left to wrap in red tinfoil for the season. Unfortunately this would be the first Christmas when we didn’t have Meemaw’s famous Coconut and Chocolate pies because she’d been a bit less detail oriented there, having this year substituted the pyrex pie pan covered in homemade crust that she usually used to hold the filling with a far easier substitute, paper plates. The result was a small fire and, according to Papa Mustang, “enough damned chocolate and coconut filling in that oven to drown a good sized possum”. Now, as he watched his wife of half a century go into her fifteenth minute of handshaking with the dog, he announced “Well, Sister Gal and the dog all set for the evening… reckon I’ll go into the garage with the boys and shoot some pool… or out back by myself and shoot some squirrels… either way, I’m taking me a Jack Daniel and RC Cola. Call me when dinner’s ready.”
Sampiro, being a first generation non-southerner forced by my father (who sounds exactly like Foghorn Leghorn: “I say, son!”-- you know, THAT accent) and mother to annually eat black eyed peas and succotash my entire childhood, having witnessed peanut-brittle potlatch shaming tactics and familiar with the use of gingerbread houses as projectile weapons, I just want you to know that the very utterance of the word “Wetumpka” in your text gave me hives.
I mean, Miracle Whip and cheese do not BELONG on canned pear halves. . .
Does your family have a connection to Wetumpka? (Actually there are several- Alabama, Oklahoma & Florida that I know of.)
Yeah, I actually have wondered about the origin of that. The same thing is sometimes done with pineapple rings as well. And it’s usually served on a piece of lettuce- that’s an unusual mingling all around (roughage, fruit, egg-oil, dairy). It’s not bad though (especially if it’s your turn to drink the pear or pineapple juice from the can). Pickled peaches and boiled peanuts, however, are a delicacy for a reason.
You don’t see Pear Salad as much ever since congealed salads hit the South running like paratroopers in Normandy. I’m guessing the southeast imports more marshmallows and green food coloring than any nation on Earth. And then cooking with Dr. Pepper and Coke was really big for a while (does anybody else remember “Dr. Pepper Burgers”, or was it just a central Bama thing?).
Yeah, my parents lived in Wetumpka AL for a few years, after oh. . . Prattville (I think-- somewhere around Montgomery) and Starkville, Mis’sippi periods.
Dr Pepper burgers. . . shudder. I can’t even imagine that. That’s, like, "bama’s equivalent of Ebola. It needs to be localized and prevented from spreading.
But. . . are they any good?
Small world. I went to high school in Wetumpka. It was terrifying (especially since I went to elementary school at an upper middle class/rich private Christian academy where you couldn’t have hair touch your collar if you were a boy or wear pants if you were a girl, then from there to Wetumpka where guys had full beards and Afros and girls could come to school pregnant and in tank tops and instead of starting the day with a devotion read over a PA system they started with having a drug dog walk the hall.
Three movies have been filmed in Wetumpka if you’re interested and don’t know it already: The Grass Harp, Big Fish and The Rosa Parks Story (where it stands in for Montgomery).
Miracle Whip does not enter my home. However, no Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner is complete without a plate of “pear salads” - canned pear halves topped with s spoonful of mayonaise (Miracle Whip? :::shudder:::), grated sharp cheddar cheese and a cherry. None of those nasty congealed salads here. I’m never sure just what has “congealed” in there and I am sure I’m better off not knowing.
My aunt and uncle arrived in their Cadillac, ready to make an impression. My uncle managed an economy motel just off the interstate in Montgomery, the type of job that doesn’t ordinarily allow one who has absolutely no family money (born grindingly poor, in fact) to buy new Cadillacs every year but it did him, as well as allowed him to buy expensive if gaudy clothing (handmade Cuban guyabaras instead of the mass produced type, bizarre loud synthetic suits that were all the rage at the time, etc.) and send his wife, my mother’s sister, on trips to Italy and Germany every year and furnish his house with medieval antiques. (A lot was being sold at that motel other than room service, we later learned- my parents suspected it even then, though his wife still insists that he got the money because “they were so glad at how he turned that place around by getting good guitar players in the bar and hiring a good barbecue cook”- she had a very loudly unhappy marriage at the time but a nice thing about being Southern Protestant rather than Roman Catholic is that you don’t have to go through all the red tape for canonization so when he died in 1979 he went from “That pimp dressing bastard I married” to “My late husband, a wonderful man God rest his lovely soul” before the paddles were removed from his nipples, but that’s also another story.)
Anyway, this was in many ways my father’s happiest Christmas, for the Aunt and Uncle Joes (both were named Jo/e) came up in large part to show off their newest Cadillac. My aunt, I must say to her credit, has considerable taste in decoration and clothing, but her husband was nouveau riche to the core and even she likes flashy cars, so even if they hadn’t seen us in a year we could count on them pulling into our driveway whenever they bought a new luxury car to show it off with the most gently implicit “see what we have that you don’t, darlings!”, but this year my Orson Wellesian father bore it wonderful stead.
“That there’s a nice car… pretty upolstery. Of course I like cloth upholst’ry better than leather… that’s why when I bought a new Cadillac myself last week I got it in blue velvet. Wanna come take a look at it?” Upstaging a nouveau riche snob is one of life’s great pleasures, even when the blue velvet in question is a week old and already smells of new car mixed with cattle feed. (My father wouldn’t drive a pickup, but he liked Cadillacs for their hauling capacity as much as the status symbol, for like my uncle he grew up pretty po himself.)
Even my mother was happily married at that moment. Her sister is a decade older and has looked upon her as a poor relation ever since their mother’s water broke, though having outlived the rest of their family they’ve mended some bridges in recent years, something akin to a Norma Desmond sister act as my aunt namedrops names of her husband’s friends from the George Wallace Administration with only some vague realization nobody even knows who they were anymore let alone is impressed by them, and my mother recalls how she was once “The greatest ersatz-Nazi wrestler of all.”
Other relatives made the forty mile hajj to the hillside as well. My aunt’s daughter, the clean living hippie artist who made her parents less than happy by calling my mother “My real Mama” and her incredibly overindulged small sons and first husband who avoided Vietnam by having his Pentecostal uncle ordain him, and her brother the 21 year old cokehead Good Ol’ Boy and his 19 year old girlfriend of the moment (who thirty years later is a fifty+ year old cokehead Good Ol’ Boy with his 19 year old girlfriend of the moment) and The Others, people with no close family or friends who flocked to Locksley Hall for Christmas, getting out of their cars to the sound of gunfire that would imply that either Mustang had elected to shoot squirrels with his traveling pistol instead of pool or that he took the sinking of the 8 Ball really hard. (“Travelin’ pistols” are a family tradition- Mustang’s was a .22 snubnose that he kept in his pocket and at nighttime under his pillow; my mother’s is a .25 Derringer, my sister’s a .32 snub nose and my own a .22 Beretta, though you just can’t carry them as many places as once you could, which explains the explosion of the squirrel population.)
TBC
Well thank Og there is somebody with enough taste and decorum to know that only mayo belongs on a proper pear salad. I had begun to fear I was amongst Philistines!
So, does anybody else get the privilege of “Peach Salad”? That’s a canned peach half with a mixture of mayo and cream cheese dolloped in the middle. A variation being a dollop of cottage cheese in the middle.
Sampiro this line:
is causing me to have fits of giggles at work at the most inopportune times. I can’t get it out of my head!
You know, I think I was in my twenties before I realized that Miracle Whip wasn’t mayonaise, because “mayo” was what my mother and grandmother always called it.
Mayo on fruit on lettuce makes the baby Jesus spit up.