Christmas is OVER

I'm so glad. I never did get in the groove of things. I did a lot of crying, to Mike's dismay. Small things set me off. I won't even go into the one thing that still makes me mad to think of.
Instead, I'll go into the "ashtray" saga.

In case you don't know the history, I'll give you a brief run down. A hundred years ago (13-1/2) when Mike and I got married, a friend of my Dad's gave us a wedding present but it didn't get to us until after the wedding. My sister happened to be there when it got opened. It was this hideous ashtray. We didn't smoke, and it was butt ugly. My sister piped up with "Hey, I think it's kind of cool looking". Big mistake. Big. For her birthday in October, I wrapped it up and gave it to her. She laughed, I laughed and forgot about it. For Christmas, she wrapped it up and gave it right back to me. We all laughed then, and a legend began. Each year the ashtray gets sent back and forth between us. One year she had me on a scavenger hunt to find it. Another year I cleverly disguised it as a book. Well, this year, it was my turn and it is always better to give than to receive. Mike had made the suggestion of "renting" a male stripper and pasting that steer head from the ashtray on to his general crotch area over his final g-string so when he whipped his pants off, there it would be. Well, for one thing, I didn't happen to know any male strippers right off hand, and another, I didn't want to offend any clients at the salon where she works. I know that the ladies she works with wouldn't be offended and would laugh their butts off, but who knows who'd be in the salon at the "moment". So, in lieu of a live male stripper, I got a exercise for Men Only magazine and found the perfect specimen. I cut him out, pasted him onto a piece of white card stock and hot glued the steer head in the general crotch area. Then I hung a piece of craft wire from the top and wrote on the back "Merry Christmas! I hope you enjoy your ornament!" Good, funny stuff when she opened that up. I've got pictures.

But wait, not to sound like a bad infomercial, it didn't end there. The next day, out at my Grandma's house, she had wrapped it up and gave it right back to me. In the form of a ring! She'd taken the steer head off the hot bodied dude and hot glued it onto an old ring. A wide man's ring. It was lovely. I don't have my camera, I accidentally left it at my Grandma's, but I already got the pictures of my sister opening up her ornament on my computer. I don't have the pictures of the "ring". I'm not even sure if I took any pictures of it that way, anyway. But, my sister did, for sure. I made sure it was in her truck when they left, I wasn't by any means taking it home with me for the next year.