Christmas Tale #1

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to come and visit for an extended period of time during the holidays. Every year, my brother and I would place bets on which flying outfit she would arrive in at the airport coming from Michigan. It was always either the pale blue polyester jobbie, or the festive green suit with the fur collar and cuffs. We would giggle in anticipation while peeping out the window as the car puled up with her inside.

When I was eight, we had a Norwegian exchange student living with us for a year. He shared with my mom the ingredients to a drink called Glogg (pronounced "glooooog"). It's one of those everything but the kitchen sink kind of drinks; a whole orange with cloves, prunes, nuts, spices, vodka, red wine, a spatula and the tail of a newt.

We serve this drink, much to every one's pleasure, during our annual holiday parties. Well, one year when grandmommy was still visiting and Christopher and I were small enough to not even remember this incident, she scooped out the prunes from the bottom of the finished-off glogg after a party one night. She placed them in the fridge.

To have for breakfast.

To have the alcohol-soaked prunes for breakfast.

You see where I'm going I'm sure.

The next morning my mom came downstairs to find her mother sitting at the dining table flanked by her two grandchildren. Christopher and I were laughing and laughing, and because Grandmommy's back was to us, mom just thought how nice it was that we were enjoying some time with our grandmother. After a little while of hearing us giggle on and on from the next room, she came into join us and that's when she realized, we were actually being entertained by our hammered granny.

Christopher would lean in and say, "Hey Grandmommy, say 'rutabaga'!" and Christopher and I would laugh ourselves into a tinkling frenzy watching grandmommy attempt to form the word and come no where near close in her blathering.

Mom says she just had to jam pillows around grandmommy in the chair so she wouldn't fall over. Then later, Dad helped move her upstairs where she slept off her crazy morning partying over prunes.