Christmas lights

I’m particular about the Christmas lights that I use. I like C9 bulbs the best. They are the big lights. Red and green and blue and orange. They are what my mom and dad decorated the house with when I was growing up.

Those clear ones, they’re the worst. This isn’t a beer garden or some pub. They just don’t say much in the way of the celebration of Christmas. Colored C9 bulbs say the most and they are the best. Any bulbs that are different than those of the colored C9 variety are nonsensical. Anything different is a celebration of the devil, devoid of all meaning.

When I was a kid, our house won many awards, each Christmas, for being the best decorated house in Marion, Illinois. We used plenty of C9 bulbs, close to the Clark Griswold amount of lights. We had a few plastic Christmas friends in the front yard, too. Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, and two red candles with orange flames that had the words noel written vertically on each of them. Light bills surged, coal miners were put to work, clocking overtime, and our house gave plenty of joy to those cars that drove by, slowly, enjoying the bright shine of 809 South Aikman. We did for the power and coal industry what Donald Trump has promised to do as president-elect for the power and coal industry. In other months, cars driving by our house this slow would pose a great concern. It was important to always take the faceplate off my JVC CD player, as the inhabitants of these cars were usually looking for something they could carry off when they came back a later time to pilfer. As I got older, we even had to chain down our Christmas decorations.

As Jay Z once said, “I’m from the real hood. Not the rap hood.”

Me too, Jay Z. Me too.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence our house won those awards. The blaze of the C9 bulbs. The collection of 4-foot polyethylene characters in the front yard. The personification of Christmas, if I don’t say so myself. That’s what it was.

A family Christmas

My grandma and grandpa lived across the street from me when I was growing up. My mom’s parents. Christmas with them was the best. My grandpa passing his beer to me for an illegal sip, hiding it from the other grandkids like a clandestine brewery, and my grandma making a chocolate pie that was just for me and nobody else. As I got older, she would make two of them to accommodate my grown-up 5-year-old palate. And when the constitutional ban on booze ended for me, my grandpa would take me to the VFW for a legal Old Style. Those were the days, man.

So on Christmas, we would walk across the street to celebrate. Within this celebration was another type of gala. Some sort of idiocy that we would all observe with great awe and amusement and disbelief. This aforementioned lunacy stems from a few of the relatives on my mom’s side of the family. Two or three of them that really give sanity a run for its money. There really aren’t any other words better to describe them or this situation. Imbecilic, I guess. I believe they could be affected by moderate mental retardation.

One Christmas, maybe in 1998, I guess, my mom and her sister, Karen, got into a fight. A physical altercation over the affairs of my little sister, Brittany, and our cousin, Leslie. Leslie told my sister that she was crazy and needed more medication, or something of the sorts, and my sister told my mother. Now, to Leslie’s point, she may have been correct. She is known for her stratospheric drug use. So her assessment of my sister’s medication was probably correct and without error.

My mother approached Karen with the facts of the exchange. Karen apparently knew the proper dosing of medications, too. She told my mom to take more meds and called Brittany crazy and then jumped at my mom like some sort of midget kangaroo. They fought, knocking the talking Big Mouth Billy Bass off the wall, and were promptly separated by my cousin’s husband, Justin. Justin is 6’6’’ and about 300 pounds. The fight quickly ended. I missed the entire thing. I was across the street at my house taking a shit.

I have come to believe that Christmas isn’t really Christmas without a rush of adrenaline when walking into grandma’s house. Regulators by Nate Dogg and Warren G comes to mind when I think of that 100 foot walk across Aikman street, venturing from 809 to 806.

But you can’t be any geek off the street, gotta be handy with the steel if you know what I mean, earn your keep! REGULATORS!!! MOUNT UP!

Also, my cousin, Casey, shot out the back sliding glass door at my grandma’s house with her high powered pellet gun. I don’t know how he managed to accomplish this feat of brilliance. He said it was an accident. I don’t know what he thought would happen when he pulled the trigger with the safety off, while pointing it at a glass door. This great level of dull-wittedness requires a great level of skill.

Wipe the prints and scratch off the serial numbers, we just added a shooting to this assault and battery. Way to go! Merry Christmas!