Tag Archives: holidays

Dec26

Holiday Summary 2024

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Christmas has come and gone for the year and except for New Year’s, the holidays are past. To be honest, Budge and I don’t really consider New Year’s a holiday much anymore since it takes all our energy to stay up and watch the ball drop. It was an eventful holiday season this year; much more than I would have liked it to be.

Budge got out of school the Friday before Thanksgiving for a dentist appointment. She knew she was about to be out six weeks, so what’s one more day? We went to the dentist; it was fine except Budge has to get a crown in January, but other than that, no big deal.

Tuesday before Thanksgiving though, the real adventure started. We had to be at the hospital at 5:30 AM for Budge to have her hysterectomy. She’s been angling for a hysterectomy for a couple of years now for various reasons I won’t go into here, but finally her doctor and our insurance got on the same page and approved the surgery. She went back about 7:30 AM for the procedure to begin. I went to the Chik-Fil-A there at the hospital and got some breakfast.

I got back to the waiting room, and waited. Budge’s doctor came out about 9:45 AM and told me the operation was successful and everything was fine and I should see Budge in about thirty minutes. Well, those thirty minutes turned into nearly three hours with no word from anyone about anything. I finally got called back to see her and got an explanation for what went wrong. Her pain was out of control, so they gave her a variety of pain killers at once. That made her blood pressure tank. I mean, really low. Scary low. They pumped her full of fluids to get her blood pressure back up, but the couldn’t give her anything else for pain except Tylenol.

After much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, they got her in a room and I went to see her settle in. Looked like everything was going fine. She was supposed to stay one night and come home the next day. That was before Missy appeared on the scene. Missy was Budge’s CNA. She was helping Budge into bed when she let go and Budge fell onto the bed on her left side. She said then that it felt like she’d broken a rib, but thankfully she hadn’t.

What HAD happened was one of the paths the surgeon used to do the hysterectomy lapriscopically had burst. When Budge got up a few minutes later to go to the bathroom, she was bleeding like no tomorrow. She naturally thought it was from where her uterus had been, but they soon figured out it was from the surgery channel. I could go into a lot of detail about what all this incurred, but to hit the high points, Budge developed a huge hematoma in her left abdomen that was bleeding. It took two days to get the hematoma partially drained and the bleeding to stop. Instead of one night, she stayed three nights, including Thanksgiving in the hospital.

We got her home and I played nurse to her. At first, I had to help her up and down out of her chair. That lasted about a week. Then she was able to get about, but I usually still helped her, and sometimes still do, because her belly is sore. It still looks like she was in a car wreck with all the bruising, and it’s still bleeding just a tiny bit so she has to wear a surgical dressing on that side.

So, I tended her for the last month as best as I could. For two weeks we got meals from different friends and families and we are extremely thankful for that because early on she did not feel like getting out anywhere. Now though, she is getting around on her own for the most part, even though I still help her some. She’s supposed to go back to school when classes start up on January 6, but we’ll see.

Well, that’s the scary part of the holidays. Compared to that, everything else has been fine. We didn’t get out to Christmas shop, because why would you when you have the power of the Internet to do it for you? Except for a few close friends we exchange small gifts with, Budge and I only buy for each other anymore. It makes me sad, but the majority of people we used to get gifts for are no longer with us.

Used to, we’d have a big gathering of friends and family at Mama’s house on Christmas Eve. Budge would help her get the food ready and I would run to the store when needed. Christmas Day when Granny Wham was still alive, we would go to Daddy’s for his side of the family to have a dinner or a supper, depending on who could come when. Papa Wham died the year before Budge and I married, so she never got to spend Christmas with him. When I was little, Granny Wham fixed all the food and everyone came to her house on Christmas Day, but Lord, that’s been nearly forty years ago since we were able to do that.

We had a quiet Christmas at home yesterday. We usually go to some friend’s house to see what their six kids got for Christmas, but Budge didn’t feel like it this year and I wasn’t too excited about it myself with all that has happened so we stayed home and opened gifts. We both got things we wanted and expected along with things we didn’t expect. Neither one of us is easy to buy for. Then we put a pot of chili on to cook for the day and we just dozed for a while then went out to get some snacks for lunch. We ate our chili and that was Christmas.

So, that’s our Christmas season. I hope all of you had a Merry Christmas and I hope the new year makes all your dreams come true, but to tell the truth, I wouldn’t count on it considering the state of the world. But in the mean time, know I love y’all and keep your feet clean.

Nov22

Thanksgiving 2012

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Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

I wanted to take the time this morning to ponder some of the many things I am thankful for. It’s been a tough year in many ways with Mama being so sick and other difficulties Budge and I have encountered and tried to overcome with varying degrees of success. Still, it is a poor, poor life indeed that has nothing to be thankful for and I happen to have plenty.

  • First of all, I am thankful Mama is still with us this Thanksgiving despite fighting COPD tooth and nail this entire year.
  • I’m thankful for all my family — the ones I was born with and the ones I’ve chosen and who have chosen me over the years.
  • I’m thankful for Budge and the nearly 18 years she’s deigned to put up with me.
  • I’m thankful all my furry babies are happy and healthy for another year.

Of course, everyone can be thankful for such wonderful things, but I’m thankful for some stuff others might not think of.

  • I’m thankful to live in a country where the Antichrist can be elected President and defeated for President in the same night.
  • I’m thankful to live in a country where people have the luxury of getting to act like complete fools over a bunch of young men chasing a tough little odd shaped pumpkin up and down a cow pasture.
  • I’m thankful I’ve never been shot at to be free, but I am eternally grateful for every man and woman who HAVE been shot at for my freedom.

I’ve got some things to be thankful for others may not need. I’m thankful that:

  • some scientist somewhere figured out how to isolate whatever makes bupropion and venlafaxine do what they do so I can have a chance at a normal life.
  • even though three of the four are gone on now, I had over twenty precious years with the most wonderful grandparents anyone could hope to have.
  • my beloved Papa Wham — who worked hundreds of 16+ hour days at his service station in Fountain Inn — didn’t have to see the day we’d pay for water in a bottle AND air from a pump.
  • my sweet nephew Stoney and my beautiful niece McKenzie Grace came into my life in this past year.
  • Logan and Caitlyn Brown aren’t my nephew and niece by blood, but by love and that’s all matters anyway.

Being a former librarian, I’ve got some strange things to be thankful for, such as being grateful that:

  • 75 years ago this year, a little Hobbit went on a great adventure and wrote about it in the Red Book of Westmarch.
  • Peter Jackson finally gets to put that Hobbit’s story on the big screen next month.
  • 50 years ago, a precious lady wrinkled time.
  • 150 years ago this year, Prisoner 60214 was released from 19 years hard labor and had an encounter with a kind priest that changed his life and made literary history.
  • 60 years ago a doomed little pig met a very talented spider and the rest, they say, is history.

I’m also extremely thankful for all of you, my readers, who stop by and spend a few minutes with me. I realize time is precious these days and you have many things you can do when you’re online so the fact you choose to come here, some quite regularly to see what I’ve pounded out is gratifying to say the least.

So, know I love y’all and, as always, keep those feet clean and enjoy Thanksgiving with family and friends!

 

 

Dec20

Well Merry *bleep*ing Christmas to You Too, Jerk!

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For 22 years, starting in 1659, our lovely Puritan forefathers banned Christmas. Now I don’t hold too much with Puritan beliefs. I’ve had enough commerce with modern day Fundamentalists (who are only a pale shadow of the Puritans!) to know most of their beliefs rest in the authority of men rather than Scripture. However, on this whole idea of banning Christmas — well, they may have been on to something. I just spent parts of three days at the mall with about 350,000 of my closest friends and I can testify to one irrefutable fact — a whole truckload of people would be better off mentally, emotionally, and financially if we just skipped Christmas.

Now, before anyone wants to skewer me as being a Jehovah’s Witness or irreverent towards Jesus’ birthday, let me get one thing straight. For those of you who don’t know, Jesus Christ was not born on December 25, 8 BC. The Gospels state that the shepherds were in the fields with their flocks. If you ever have the time, check out the Weather Channel for Bethlehem in December. Not all the Middle East is hot all the time. Suffice it to say neither the shepherds nor their sheep would have been out in the fields in December in Judea.

No, Christmas as we know and love (or loathe) it today is a pastiche of pagan traditions adapted by some early Christians to make their new religion more appealing to their pagan neighbors. They basically co-opted the traditional Feast of Saturnalia from Roman pagans and later on, when Christianity reached the British Isles, the Druids added a healthy dose of their traditional Winter Solstice or Yuletine celebration to the Roman underpinnings. Honestly though, I don’t care about the origins of the Christ Mass. Christ can be honored at Christmas just as much as people want to honor Him. Or not. Paganism has nothing to do with my musings on canceling Christmas.

I’d consider canceling Christmas because it has morphed from “Tis the Season to be Jolly” into “Tis the Season to be a Raging Douchebag!”

Face it, NOTHING brings the collective inner a-holes of society to the surface like the Christmas season. Starting somewhere around August these days we start seeing the first glimmerings of the tinsel to come. Then stores get fully decorated as soon as the black cats and witches hats come down for Halloween. Thanksgiving gets brushed off and then OMG!

It’s Black Friday and the world loses its freaking mind!

From the Friday after Thanksgiving until sometime around the first week of January, you take your life into your hands if you venture to within a mile of a retail establishment. People will SHOOT YOU over a parking spot at the mall. I have personally been given the middle finger by several little old blue haired ladies driving their stretched out Cadillacs around the parking lot of Haywood Mall like the Malachy Brothers and Pinky Tuscadero in a demolition derby.

The Bird — from GRANDMA! That’s what Christmas DOES to people these days.

If you want to visit a breeding ground for strokes and heart attacks, head out to the nearest US Post Office starting around the second week in December. I was in my local station last Thursday to pick up some stamps and this guy a few people back in line from me gets on his cell phone (I will refrain from my “cell phone in public places” rant) and starts pitching a fit with whoever was on the other end. He actually SAID, “I’ll be here for AT LEAST an hour because for some reason EVERY IDIOT in this town brought TEN BOXES to mail!”

Really?

And people accuse ME of going off at the drop of a hat! Dude, word of advice — buy a calendar and some Xanax! Better make it the PURPLE ones too, because you are BEYOND the orange ones.

What I don’t understand is WHY ALL THE FUSS?!

For nearly six solid weeks, the great mass of quietly desperate sheeple run around like AD-HD lemmings on meth buying gifts they can’t afford with money they don’t have to give to people they probably don’t like. Why? Men are forced at bayonet point to put up trees and string lights on those trees and many of those men resort to alcohol in an effort to deal with the madness of trying to make out the color of the one remaining microscopic fleck of paint on the tip of a boxful of artificial tree branches! Is it orange or brown! Makes a difference you know.

We won’t even TALK about the lights. I don’t have the raw numbers, but I’m nearly certain the three leading causes of divorce in America are fights over money, lack of communication, and STRINGING CHRISTMAS LIGHTS ON A TREE!

“YES, DEAR, I see the big gaping hole where we need more lights!!”

People don’t enjoy Christmas anymore. They can’t. The “retail therapy” pushers won’t let them. What should be a nice, calm time for friends and family has turned into a materialistic feeding frenzy! My two oldest nephews get more toys and gadgets and stuff at ONE family get-together than Wilson’s Five and Ten’s whole inventory when I was growing up. The push to keep up with the Joneses who don’t even know you exist has driven people to madness.

People will STEAL PRESENTS out of a car. That is almost, but not quite as low as stealing money out of the offering plate as it comes by (not making change in the offering plate, that’s different). I’ve just recently seen women get into hair-pulling, shirt-ripping cat fights over the last Elmo doll — WHILE THEIR KIDS WERE WATCHING!

It’s unbelievable! Folks get trampled to DEATH every year at Wal-marts and Target stores over a sale on DVDs or some such nonsense. A person’s life has become cheaper to society than a round piece of laser etched plastic.

I can imagine Jesus looking over this chaos that — once upon a time — used to be set aside to celebrate His birth and thinking, “Really, guys?”

So watch out for the bird-flipping grannies out there and if you MUST go out to a mall sometime in the next four days, PLEASE be careful! It’s a tinsel wrapped, tiny light strung jungle out there!

Love y’all! Keep those feet clean!