Thankful Day 26 & 27

November 26: Sarcasm… and/or Humor
THANK GOD FOR SARCASM and for people who have a decent sense of humor. Am I right or am I right?

For a long time now, I have thought sarcasm might be my love language and it’s taken me right around 23 years to realize that it is not EVERYONE’S love language. (A difficult lesson to learn if I do say so myself.) Sarcasm got me through the day on November 25. Black Friday means nothing to our family as far as shopping goes, but it means everything to our family as far as attic organization goes.

This year, we got to (happily, with a smile on) organize 3 households of Christmas decorations into one and hoist color-coordinated boxes up and down the attic ladder for something around 6 hours. All the sibs were outside, sweating to death, packing Thanksgiving décor into orange boxes and trying to figure out how many wreaths one family could possibly own. The answer would baffle your mind. I’d say we have over 20 Christmas wreaths. Maybe 30. Not to mention, more “Snow Village” figurines than any gift shop in this town.

We were determined to tear down the Thanksgiving/Fall décor, and re-decorate for Christmas over the course of one 12-hour day. We did not accomplish said feat. Not even remotely close. It took us 3 days of blood, sweat and tears. We banished Carson and Roman to the roof for stringing lights, while Kaleb, Brit and I were cussing at lighted Christmas trees because nothing, I repeat NOTHING can make us blackout rage more than the light-up Christmas trees in the “DO NOT DESTROY” trash bags. Extension cord mania, and about 12 blown fuses later, we lit that house like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Brittney and I put garland and ornaments around the front door frame and wrapped the banisters with greenery and twinkle lights. When I say “we” I mean that I did all that, and she just got stuff out of boxes while looking at me like “our family has lost their damn mind” the whole time. I think she might have even vocalized that once or twice. Trudy and Mom were organizing maniacs and if you were to have walked into our garage on Saturday morning you would have thought we were having a holiday themed Garage Sale. They designed a holiday house display that looks as if it were in a Better Homes and Garden Magazine. And so one minute we had pumpkins gracing our mantle, and then…a mere 72 hours later, we have got a reindeer up there with jingle bells hanging from his antlers. Mission Accomplished? Absolutely.

Amongst everything already mentioned, we planted real Christmas trees for the sake of their smell and played Justin Bieber’s Christmas album along with the Folk Angel Christmas CD and Silent Night on Piano. We blared the music as loud as we could and we set up the tree. We loaded that thing down with ornaments and bows and lights and beads. We put up wooden mooses (I know its grammatically incorrect and I don’t care) with Christmas sweaters and busted out the Holiday dishes. We hung wreaths on every window and door and we put out all the Christmas pillows. We switched all the candles to Christmas scents and put red and green dog collars on our ridiculous amount of pups.

And by golly, we did it using sarcasm! Because otherwise we would have all needed counseling. We decked the halls with boughs of holly like you have never seen before. We giggled and wrestled and made fun of ourselves for having so much C.R.A.P. One time I got stuck between a box and the attic and was stranded mid-way up the latter but couldn’t stop laughing long enough to un-wedge myself. We laughed at how horrible one of the light-up trees looked and nobody volunteered to fix it. We laughed at whatever the hell we were wearing which in my case involved tall socks on top of leggings like an idiot. We laughed at how many dogs were nipping at our heels. We laughed and laughed and laughed and we were thankful. And sarcastic as hell.

Some of my favorite displays of humor included, but are not limited to the following list:

1. Carson’s impression of Brian Regan jokes. Specifically the one about Animal Sounds, like dogs saying bow wow. Could. Not. Pull. It. Together.

2. Being literal. A surefire way to drive people (READ: me) absolutely insane is to respond to well-known expressions as literally as possible. It’s hilarious and infuriating. For example, if someone is commiserating with you and says, “Join the club!” respond by asking about their annual membership fees. Or if someone is agreeing with something you commented briefly about by saying, “Tell me about it!” look them squarely in the eye and say, “I just did.” Roman and Carson are champions at this and it gets me every time.

3. Using “I know you are but what am I” as my one and only comeback for everything. I never did this, but I think it would be awesome. Add that to the to-do list for Christmas break.

4. Making fun of any person who seemed to be doing less work than the rest of us during the decoration commemoration of 2011.

5. Over emphasizing our Texan Accents, and speaking ONLY in movie quotes, which we did an amazing job of on Friday night during dinner because all of the guests that we had over were absolutely silent as they had no idea what we were talking about for the majority of the night. Inside jokes make the people inside feel like a million bucks and the people outside feel like idiots.

But humor is humor and sarcasm is sarcasm and if you don’t understand that, then I will probably never marry you. But that’s neither here nor there and regardless, I am thankful for sarcasm and humor and laughter and all that comes with it. And to legitimize this whole argument I could talk for another hour about how funny God is, especially in my life. I mean, the whole humor thing was his idea in the first place.


November 27: Man’s Best Friend
Remember that movie “All Dogs Go To Heaven”? Please note that all cats do not go to heaven, because cats are selfish and arrogant and deceitful and Jesus doesn’t like any of those character qualities. I love dogs. Or, better, I love the idea of dogs. I love the idea of wrestling a huge, slobbery dog and sleeping beside him and going on runs with him. I love big dogs. But as Megan so lovingly pointed out, I really would prefer that said dog did not smell like a dog or cost me money or pee in the house.

As it stands, my family is a bunch of dog hoarders. It was one thing when we lived in separate homes, but throughout the past few years, our entire family lives in one little house and we have 5 weenie dogs. And a bulldog is living with us while my aunt is too sick to take care of him. So, make that 6 dogs. Animal hoarding at its finest. The dachshund pups are named: 1.) Oreo 2.) Skittles 3.) Kinsler (After Ian Kinsler of the Texas Rangers) 4.) Kipp and 5.) Tucker. And although small dogs usually infuriate me, I can’t help but love these little guys. Kipp and Kinsler cuddled with me all night last night while watching a movie, and Kinsler has velvet ears making him my favorite to snuggle.

I have always kind of been against having 5 weenie dogs for pets. But sometimes you don’t choose the gift, the gift chooses you. And like we already established: God is funny that way.

After much deliberation I have decided that weenie dogs are not so bad. They aren’t Huskies, Labradors, Mastiffs or Golden Retreivers but they love our family more than life itself. And they know when we are sad and act accordingly. And they are fun. And sometimes dare I say, even cute. They bring us a ton of joy and a ton of messes to clean up, and we don’t even mind, as long as I am not primarily in charge of cleaning up.

So thanks God, for blessing our family with 5 little companions whose bodies are too long and legs are too short. We really do love them dearly. Even Skittles, our massively overweight weenie pup whose head is at least 8x too small for her blimp like body.