My Best Christmas Ever

Sunny, 63/42, Fair to Fair. Well, the goat keeps hanging in there.... I don't know for how much longer though. She keeps getting thinner and thinner, but still seems to be eating and not in any pain. I've decided to let her have a go at it until she struggles getting to her feet, then I'll put her down. In other news, the farmhouse is getting electricity next week. We put in the meter base last weekend and I put in the application yesterday. Hopefully next Wednesday we'll have power and my tools won't be at the mercy of an underpowered generator.

It occurred to me looking at the last post y’all might take me for some sort of scrooge. That is not the case at all, because the best Christmas ever will probably happen in three more days, just like it did last year and the year before that…. Actually, the best Christmas ever doesn’t even take place on the 25th of December, but the night before. Oh sure, we open gifts on the 25th like most everyone else, but Christmas Eve is when the real festivities are. Well, let me describe it….

It begins before daybreak on the 24th with a hurried cup of coffee, a brief conversation with my wife, and me going off to find things to do around the farm. It is understood that we are on our own for whatever food we can scrounge up that day, and none will be from our kitchen because for the next nine hours my wife will be working herself into a frenzy cooking up sausage balls, cheese balls, shrimp, barbequed weenies, pigs and blankets, cookies, candies, and chips and cheese dips. From the moment we are told to skedaddle, she is left alone in her own private pleasure she calls cooking (its only a pleasure on this day mind you as we hear over and over the rest of the year….).

At about 4 o’clock we all gather back at the house and get ready for Children’s Mass at the church. During mass, we see the same play that has been repeated for hundreds of years, with the manger and baby Jesus. My wife and I remember when our kids were in those plays. In fact we look back at one year most fondly. It was the year both boys were given the coveted “post” part in the play. In order to play the post, the boys had to hold up two of the four posts that held a piece of fabric that represented the manger roof. Lots of pictures were taken that year and now I can show them proof whenever they do something stupid and I tell them they’re acting “as dumb as a post……..”

With all apologies to Father Charley, Father Allen, and our Lord, by the end of mass it gets really hard to concentrate. The food starts getting into my brain, and I don’t think I’ve ever really not tried to increase the closing hymn song speed. After we pile into the car, it seems to take forever to get home to the feast.

When we get home, friends and relatives start arriving. The food is brought out and everyone gets there own buffet style and won’t stop eating until the about 4 hours later. When the first wave is over, someone goes and gets a deck of cards that haven’t seen the light of day since last year’s Christmas and the fun begins.

I don’t know if it’s the card playing or what, but everyone seems to have a good time. The boys needle their great grandpa who’s almost eighty years older then them for rubbing his fingers or his chest trying to get someone to call up diamonds or hearts. This gets Pa-paw started on some stories and the card game stops while the boys listen to tales of runaway horses, playing hooky, or dipping a school girl’s pigtails into the inkwells. The same stories I heard as a kid except the horses are faster, the schoolmaster was meaner, and the girls were uglier….

Around 11 pm the Television get turned on, and some of us break away to watch the mass at the Vatican. The boys continue to play cards, but Pa-paw is about give out. Grandma and Grandpa are usually good for one more game of euchre though and after that, most everyone heads home.

I help Kathy clean up. It is the end to a magical time. Tonight, everyone was on equal footing. Kids were not nagged. Pa-paw was not being watched over like a hawk to make sure he was not getting confused. The food is great and the games that were played didn’t need a joystick and everyone from 8 to 93 could understand them. It is a 4 to 6 hour time of total peace in our family, before the surprises of life start up again for the next year.

So different from that Christmas twenty some years ago in a foreign land; so wonderful, and so worth the wait.

The Worst Christmas Ever

Sunny, 65,43, Fair to Fair. The sunny weather continues, but not all things are looking good on the farm. I've got an animal going down. She's got the scours real bad and I've tried a bunch of things to get her well, but she keeps getting thinner and thinner. This week, I'm trying some last resort medicines. Unlike cows, it doesn't make sense for the vet to come out for a $70 goat, so I keep trying and trying. If she gets much weaker, I'll just have to put her down....... man I hate to do that......

While I was getting ready this morning, I sat and looked at our Christmas tree. Thinking back on Christmas’s past, I remembered my worst Christmas ever. I thought I’d let y’all in on it.

I was in South Korea, about 10 minutes from Panmunjom at a base camp which I believe was called Liberty. I was a medic in an infantry unit that was patrolling a section of no mans land called the Demilitarized Zone, DMZ for short. The Routine was to do a 24 hour patrol in the DMZ, come back and get debriefed, and get a little sleep. The next day was weapons cleaning and requalifying the weapon and getting whatever personal stuff needed to be done. The third day was a battery of inspections, then get transported up to a guard post inside the DMZ. This was a three day cycle that seemed to go on forever.

In addition, we happened to be going through a cold snap and the temperature at 0 degrees or below. Because of the cold, orders came down that people responsible for vehicles needed to get up twice in the night and start them. So on non patrol days, I’d get up at midnight and 4am to start my transport truck.

We stayed in a canvas tent that would house about 25 guys. There were two diesel fuel heaters in the tent that looked like mini woodstoves, but gave off less than half the heat. Each one of us had an area for our cot, duffel bag, and footlocker. We tried to spruce up our areas best we could with whatever was sent from home. Around Christmas time, some areas in the place looked down right festive with cards and letters from family and friends.

I had four Christmas cards sitting on my foot locker. They were from my Wife, Mom and Dad, and both Grandparents. Not much, but I would read them everyday (as I would a lot of my letters that came too few and far between), until they started to tear at the fold marks.

My cot happened to be next to a hard nosed inner city kid from the east coast. New Jersey I think. He was an alright guy, but didn’t say much to me or anyone else. Kind of the bully of the squad, but since I was pretty quiet too, he pretty much left me alone. The one thing I did notice about his area, was that where everyone else had their cards and letters in their area, he had none.

Well, I got back in from a 4am check on the deuce and a half, and I heard the Jersey guy say “Hey Bach, throw those cards over here”. I gathered up the four of them and threw him on his cot. He read them while I was getting out of my boots, field jacket, and BDU’s. About 10 minutes after I crawled into the bag, I heard the cards hit my cot near my head and the Jersey guy say “Merry F----‘n Christmas Bach”. Alls I could manage was a “yeah” in return. He rolled over and with his back to me, I could hear sniffles and a small sigh, he tried to cover by clearing his throat. I was welling up inside too.

That was the only Christmas greeting I got that day. A few hours later we were walking in a wasteland. A piece of land that the country we were in claimed as off limits except to people with weapons and bad intentions. No peace on earth, no good will towards men, just bullets and barbed wire, and some lonely, lonely soldiers.

Do me a favor this Christmas, if you have any relatives in the military whether they’re overseas or next door. Get a Christmas card and write the longest letter you can write and send it to them. They may never tell you, but it just may be the biggest pick-me-up on what is supposed to be the happiest day of the year.

Thanks

Wormin' Time

Sunny, 68/30, Fair to Fair. Been sunny here for a week and a half. Both boys play basketball, so its hard to get the chores done before their games. Most farm chores are happening on weekends only now. Last weekend, I fired up the ol hand cranked sheller and finished up this years feed corn shelling. It went pretty well, I also ended up with enough seed corn to plant for next year. More than I expected with the drought this year.

With this seasons drought it was bound to happen. Worms!! A couple of my nannies were looking a little peaked, so along with my wife, we went out for a two hour bout of wrestling, chasing, and being chased that we around here call worming. While my wife was finding all the medicine and syringes and stuff, I rounded them all up to the sounds of the Commodores. Now if you think these goats just happen to like the funky sound while their owner is getting down with his bad self, you are wrong. While “Brick House” is being sung at the top of my lungs, I’m also shaking a bucket of corn. I tell my wife it’s a combination of the two, she thinks its just the corn….. she may be right…

Well, they all get into the pen… all except Billy. He’s looking at my wife kinda suspiciously. He looks at the corn, then looks at her and then me with a “What’s she doing here?” kind of look. Finally, Billy can’t stand others eating food while he’s not (my wife says I have that problem too), and he runs to the food trough. The gate slams, and the fun is about to begin.

Our pen is square, with an alley for running the goats up to a gate. I follow them up the alley, and when they reach the end, I grab them. Then Kathy reaches through and gives them the worming medicine and we open the gate and let the goat out and move on to the next one. This works pretty well on everyone except Billy, who tries to leap or butt, or crawl through and known barrier or pursuer. We try to get him out first.

For me, catching Billy is a delicate balance of maintaining my manliness, and staying alive. Any given Billy catching session will contain tough talk with an occasional curse word, while not trying to dirty my drawers when I realize Billy sees his only way out is through me. I swear my wife just comes along to laugh at a 6’3” 230 lb man trying to regain his bravado after screaming like a sissy man when Billy lowers his head and charges.

Well I finally had Billy cornered next to the hay rack. The other goats had moved to the perimeter of the pen and were watching the two wills collide. The whole catch pen was taking on a football stadium kind of atmosphere. Billy looked at me……then the hayrack….and I saw it!! My wife screamed at the top of her lungs “Did you see that? Did you see that look? That’s the man look I’ve been trying to tell you about!!”

Ahhhh….. the man look. The look my wife says I get just before I go and do something really stupid. It’s the look I get when I go to show my Varsity football playing son how to block even though its been 30 years since I played football and he’s in the weight room all the time. It’s the look I get when I strap on water skis and decide that at 44 years old, I’m just as nimble as I was in high school. Its also the look I get when while standing in Wal-Mart, I get the bright idea that a Hoover upright vacuum cleaner is the right gift for our 20th anniversary. Anyway, lets just say… I know the look.

Well Billy had the look too just before he decided the only way out was to jump the hayrack…. He didn’t make it. Now stuck on top of the hayrack, he tried to scramble over. While scrambling, he got his leg caught in one of the steel hay supports. He let out a bellow and my wife screamed “Do something”.

So with the grace and elegance of a fine herdsman, I quickly moved in and calmly let his leg go from being caught. Then upon freeing him Billy jumped off the hay rack and stood there looking at me, I knew from the on…we’d be best friends.

“Do Something Brad!!” I quickly snapped out of my day dream. The only way to get him unstuck was to lift him off the rack. At close to 200 lbs. it wasn’t going to be easy. So I ran behind him and lifted him off the rack while trying to avoid his ol’ spread out Kiko-like horns. I pulled backwards until his leg pulled free. When it pulled free, I lost my balance and fell backwards. Billy fell on top of me and scrambled trying to get up. I ended up avoiding most of the flailing hooves and with Billy on his feet and my wife laughing her… uh… head off. After Billy was gone, and I was laying there flat on my back, I decided to open my eyes. There above me was one of my nannies chewing her cud and staring down at me. She looks at me and lets out the most obnoxious bawl I’ve heard in quite a while. I got up quickly, brushed off the dingle berries and continued the chase.

Eventually I caught Billy and all the other goats (with the exception of one kid who squeezed through the gate). We wormed and doctored them. When it was finished, I looked out to the edge of our pasture an along the tree line. All the goats were grazing contently. All except Billy, who just stared at me. I have a feeling Billy might be causing another headache come spring worming time.