Unusual Christmas Gifts

   A lump of coal seems to be a pretty unusual Christmas gift. I suspect, however, to the starving people struggling through the Irish Potato Famine, it might not have been quite as useless as it is in our day and age.

   We’ve gotten used to getting kitchen appliances, tools, and snow shovels for Christmas. Sometimes those are our favorite gifts.

   But there are some people who carry the “I-don’t-know-what-to-get-you” thing farther than others. My Cousin Joy’s son, Evan, is one of them. For years now he has given her exceptionally unusual gifts, at no small expense either. The first one was a “Leg Lamp” like the one seen in the movie, “The Christmas Story.”

   One year it was a fully operational slot machine. It was a massive thing and sat in her basement for a couple of years until she finally found someone to take it off her hands. The smaller family members enjoyed playing with it…for a little while.

   This year he planned to give her a real shrunken head. Yes, you read that right. But then he forgot to get a favorite friend a gift, so he gave it to the friend, and Joy doesn’t have to figure out what to do with it.

   But the best of his unusual gifts was a fully articulated human skeleton (plastic, we hope).

   He brought it home where he and his brothers tried to think of a really unusual way to give it to Joy.  They all remembered that her mother was a heavy smoker who always smoked Raleigh cigarettes, so they decided to set the skeleton up in the driver's seat of Joy’s car, and have her smoking a Raleigh with a long ash on it.

   The next problem was to get Joy to go outside to find the skeleton. It took them quite awhile, but finally they convinced her that she needed something in the garage. She went out, got whatever it was, and came back in, never seeing the skeleton at all. Eventually they got her to really look, and the fun began.

   There was a woman in town who was really skinny. Her name was Marilyn, so Marilyn became the name of the skeleton.

   Joy likes a good laugh as well as anyone, and she set about entertaining Marilyn in every way she could find. She took her to coffee in the morning. She took her to the bar where they propped Marilyn up on a bar stool. She even took Marilyn to a dance where Marilyn sat in with the band and had no shortage of real live beaus to take her on to the dance floor.

   The next Christmas Joy’s family came up with another idea. They used a rocking chair as a sleigh and a reindeer made of a saw horse (with a real deer head attached). These they mounted to Joy’s roof and aimed a spotlight on it. And Marilyn, dressed in a Santa suit, brought Christmas joy to everyone.

   Unusual Christmas gifts that bring so much laughter are rare and wonderful.

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Walking Home

When I was a freshman at Woodruff High School, we lived on North Jefferson and I walked the 10 or so blocks to and from school. On the way home, I often encountered three grade school aged kids, a boy and two girls returning home from Greely Grade School which right across the street from our apartment house. The smallest girl was always walking up in the grass.

I was shy at the time (I’ve gotten over that, thank goodness), and didn’t really know how to handle saying ‘hi’ every time we met, so often I would cross the street and walk down the other side so I didn’t have to say hello. Seems silly now, but that’s how it was. During my sophomore year we moved  to Dechman Street so I no longer met them when I was walking home.

Occasionally I’d see a dark-haired, older boy going into the house where the three kids lived, but I merely noted the fact and didn’t think any more about it.

Fast-forward a year.

Ronnie Marshall was going to run for school president and he noticed that I was always drawing, so he thought I might be an addition to his campaign committee. The time of the first meeting arrived (February 1954), and Buddy Curtis was to pick me up and take me to another committee member’s house; I think she lived on North Madison across from the Episcopal Church. Someday I’m going to remember to drive down that street and see if my memory is right or if it’s all haywire.

On the way, Buddy was to pick up some boy who was playing in the Woodruff High Jazz Band. There was another boy in the pick-up truck, but I can’t remember who he was. He and Buddy kept talking about how this guy they were to pick up was so funny!

We waited just awhile and out came a guy from the school, and we four (in the front seat of a pick-up) headed the few blocks to the meeting place. All evening I noticed the “funny” boy, and he was indeed funny. Kept everyone in stitches.

I looked for him at school the next week, but didn’t see him. The next meeting of the committee came, and we managed to be sitting next to each other all evening and in the back of the pick-up on the way to my house.

Fast forward again.

The funny fellow turned out to be Jim Fyke. We’ve been married 54 years now, and he still keeps me in stitches.

The three kids I met on Madison Street were his brother and sisters, Gary, Mary Ellen and Barbara. The boy entering the house was probably him.

Soon I was a frequent visitor at 1209 NE Madison. We dated for 5 years before we could afford to get married.

Fast forward yet again.

At the gathering of the five Fyke siblings in June 2013, Barbara (the youngest, the one who walked in the grass) said that the three of them often talked about the pretty girl they met on the street. She and Mary Ellen noticed that the girl had a leather purse! And a camelhair coat! And they wondered if she were nice or snooty. I had no idea they even noticed me, let alone remembered so many details.

You know, I can never tell teen agers that their high school loves are just passing infatuations, because Jim and I fell in love when we were just 17 and 15, and I can’t imagine having lived the last 59 years (54 married, 5 dating) without him.