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Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Christmas with The Farmers

It's time for me to go home, to spend Christmas with the Farmers. No, I do not mean I will spend Christmas in a rural area where the air is clear and the grass grows tall and people truly know the meaning of the word 'neighbour'. No, in this case I mean Christmas with my family - The Farmers.

Back when I was growing up we would all (and by all I mean EVERY member of the family from my Grandpa Farmer down to the Great- Grandkids)gather together to celebrate Christmas. Being that we lived within a 10 minute drive of each other, with my Grandpa just 5 houses down the street from us, this was usually rather easy to do.

We would start celebrating a week or 2 early, when we went out and looked at Christmas lights. This was one of my fondest memories - a bunch of people would gather together in a couple of cars, and then the rest of us would jam into my Dad's suburban, with very few of us having seatbelts on and about 7 or 8 kids jammed in the back without seatbelts on. My dad would be the one driving the suburban, of course. It's his pride and joy and absolutely nobody else is allowed to touch it. It's a 1976 brown suburban, slightly rusty in parts. The 'Suburb' part of 'Suburban' fell off however, so it's no longer a Suburban, it's actually an 'an'. And as we drove around to look at lights we would sing 'Bye Bye Miss American Pie', the real Don MacLean version, none of this fake Madonna garbage for us, and to this day it's still my favorite Christmas Carol.

Whenever we would go over a big dip in the road or over the railroad tracks, dad would go about 50 mph over them, making all of us unseatbelted grandkids in the back bounce around like crazy.

And right now, as my Grandma Farmer reads this, she's groaning and saying to herself "Oh...no...They didn't! Oh, my conscience! Those grandkids will be the death of me with their playing hockey and horseback riding and wrestling and driving too fast!"

And then we would finally all gather together in the same house for Christmas Eve, and all talk at the top of our voices to make ourselves heard. This may seem loud and boorish for most of you, but this is absolutely necessary for us. We all speak rather loudly, even the shy ones.

True story: when I talk to my family on the phone and I'm sitting in a chair at the table, not even slouching, I can put the phone down on the table, face up, and still hear them loud as a bell. This is not a complaint - this is a statement of fact. I do it as well. If I ever call any of you on the phone, I advise you to have your phone turned down to the lowest volume possible. If it has one, you should use the 'mute' button.

And here we are all talking amongst ourselves, with nobody really able to hear themselves think, and Grandpa Farmer saying every 3 minutes, "What'd they say?" Then Grandma, "Fred, turn your hearing aid on!" "My hearing aid is on Gene! I can hear every word they say - now what'd Susan say? I couldn't hear because you were talking!" My Great-Aunt Coleen said of us, "I think they're all deaf!" And there you haveit: Christmas with The Farmers.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

don't you just love the holidays? Happy Christmas!!

December 23, 2005 4:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

MERRY CHRISTMAS- YOU HAVE WON A PRIZE... BUT I CAN'T TELL YOU WHAT IT IS!!!! MWA HA HA

December 27, 2005 10:51 AM  
Blogger CT said...

Why can't you tell me what it is? And how do I pick up said prize? Do I have to purchase 30 magazine subscriptions in order to have a chance of winning the prize?

December 30, 2005 1:48 PM  

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