The Penultimate Holiday

I woke up this morning, sat up in bed stretching my arms over my head and said, "Ahh! The penultimate holiday!'

My wife opened one eye to a small slit and stared at me. So I stretched again and said again, "Ahh! The . . ."

"I heard you the first time." she muttered into the blanket.

"Well, it is." I insisted.

"Yeah, whatever . . ." she mumbled and rolled over, burrowing deeper into the covers. I sat there a few moments wondering how anyone could have so little curiosity. So I nudged her.

"Hon?" I said softly. Then I nudged her a little harder. I got an irritated half-growl and she pulled further away from me. "Hon?" I repeated.

"WHAT?" The blankets exploded away from her and I fell off the bed backwards.

"Oh, never mind." I said, scrambling to my feet and backing out of the room. "I'll tell you later."

While I was brewing a cup of coffee she appeared in the doorway. It's a good thing we met 35 years ago, I thought. "You're no picnic, either." she said, apparently reading my mind. Married people do that after a while. Little boys are right. Girls are creepy.

"So what's so important that you can't let me sleep in on Christmas Eve?"

"If you choose to call it that." I answered.

"What are you talking about?" she growled, taking my coffee cup. I gestured rather futilely to my cup then began brewing another one.

"Christmas Eve is the penultimate holiday." I explained. "Penultimate means the second to last or the next to last in a series of things."

"Yeah . . . so?"

"In this case it is penultimate for two reasons. First, it is the last day before Christmas. But . . . and this is the really cool part, it is also a holiday on it's own."

"Nobody celebrates Christmas Eve." she sounded kind of exasperated.

"Yes they do." I insisted. It even has it's own name: Christmas Eve. We don't hear about Groundhog Day Eve or Easter Eve or Fourth of July Eve or Labor Day Eve or . . ."

"Enough! I get it." she said. "But so what?"

"Don't you get how cool that is?" I asked. "It is a holiday known for being the last day before another holiday AND it is the next to last holiday of the whole freakin' year!" I sat there looking at her. Waiting for something -- some kind of response. "AND there is a word for it! Penultimate means next to last. It is the next to last for two reasons. How cool is that?"

She just sat there looking at me, still half asleep, holding my World's Greatest Coffee Drinker mug. "What about New Year's Eve?" she asked.

"That doesn't count." I said. "It cancels itself out."

"What's that mean?"

"It might be known as being the last night before a holiday but that holiday isn't until next year. That means it's not the next to the last -- it's the next to the first holiday." I took a sip from the World's Most Patient Wife mug I was holding. "So . . . Christmas Eve wins."

That turned out to be the penultimate statement of that conversation.

.

The Angel & The Tree

This is the story of how the angel got on top of the Christmas tree.

A long time ago, in a place where wishes and dreams go when they leave our lips as breath on a cold winter's day, lived an old man and some of his friends. And these were magical friends, indeed.

There were elves whose clever little fingers and nimble little brains could reverse engineer anything worth outsourcing to countries with cheap labor and no plan of their own. There were reindeer with the ability to bend the space time continuum, allowing the old man access to little boys and girls secret wishes and desires, thus casting them as naughty or nice. The younger reindeer were able to fly through sub-space, teleporting gifts to worthy little crumb munchers while circumnavigating the globe in the blink of an eye. And there was an "angel" named Linda whose talents usually helped the old man relax at night.

The old man, at this point in our story, had been doing his job for many, many years. He liked his job and he was good at it. So naturally things were about to change.

The elves were thinking about unionizing, citing health care costs and long work days as their chief complaints. So they were squeezing the old man with a work slow down. The reindeer were suddenly questioning the efficacy of their surveillance techniques and were talking of forming a committee. One of the younger reindeer had developed a nose bleed during their last practice run. And Linda had been a little cranky, lately.

So, there he was. The old man was weeks behind in his production schedule, his Naughty and Nice List was suspect, he had a young buck out on Workman's Comp and he hadn't been relaxed in days. He was mad enough to pull a Michael Richards.

Suddenly, the front door blows open and Linda comes in pulling a scraggly Christmas tree behind her; the wind and snow scattering the old man's revised production schedules and surveillance reports everywhere. She looks at him sweetly and asks, "Where would you like me to put the tree, Santa?"

And that's how the angel got on top of the Christmas tree!

NEXT UP: How the Bride and Groom got on top of the Wedding Cake.

.

Complications

They are all dead. It's like a bad dream but I am sitting here with the bodies of my wife, my best friend, three Girl Scouts, and a UPS guy stacked up like so much firewood. Eventually, someone will find me with the bodies and, when they find my DNA on the Girl Scouts, I am sure no one will listen. So I've gotta explain.

I guess it all started on a hot December morning in 1951 Georgia. My mother was about ready to give birth to me in a dusty army camp called Fort Benning. She would later say it was so hot that day that the Christmas candles in the windows of our cheap base housing unit melted in the sunlight. I was . . . What? Oh. I'm sorry. I went too far back? Let's start again.

Earlier today I had gone out for a nature hike and, as I was tramping through the nearby woods, I spotted a perfectly delightful specimen of a Yellow Thrush. I tried to remain perfectly still as I studied its movements. My binoculars allowed me uncanny access to its magical wanderings as the vagabond bird flitted from one diversion to another. Suddenly, it paused upon a branch, puffed out its golden breast and began to . . . What now? Still too far back? OK.

When I returned from my walk, I came home and had crazy monkey sex with my wife. As we lay there, exhausted and spent, was when I first noticed the Girl Scouts. They were sitting side by side on the couch, swinging their little legs, staring at us.

"How long have they been there?" I asked my wife.

"Since before you got home." She replied casually.

Always the polite host, I got up from under the kitchen table and shook hands with the paramilitary waifs. When I finished, they each looked at their hand, as if I had somehow defiled them, and wiped it on their little brown uniforms. At that point I noticed my nakedness and pulled on a pair of nearby boxers. And I swear to God, that is how my DNA got on their clothing.

"What are they doing here?" I asked.

"Well, when I got back," my wife answered, as she pulled a sun dress on over her head, "they were beating Danny to death with that fireplace poker. They were taking turns."

That would explain the blood splatter on them and the bloody pile of bones and the Hawaiian shirt by the fireplace. "But why would they do that!" I over-emoted.

"He must have stiffed them on the macaroons, again." she said.

As I stood looking at the seemingly peaceful little girls, two of them made claws of their hands and pounced on me. "What the hell!" I screamed. The third one attacked my wife. Out of the corner of my eye I saw them stumble onto a still running chainsaw and I realized Danny must have been taken by surprise while he was cutting firewood. The saw was still running because he always duct taped the trigger to avoid having to restart it. (His arms were kind of puny and he was always asking either my wife or the neighbor kid to pull his cord.) Neither of them stood a chance against the still running saw.

Meanwhile, I had my hands full with the other two hellcats. One of them had her legs wrapped around my neck and was trying to gouge my eyes out while the other one was clinging to my thigh and snapping a pair of pinking shears at my crotch. I stumbled backwards and impaled the one on my back on a marble phallus that Nina brought back from an adult flea market that the local volunteer fire department holds a couple of times a year.

That just left the one on my leg. I grabbed her by the hair, swung her twice over my head and let go. She landed with her head in the fireplace; her hair and skull an instant fireball; her little legs kicking a frantic tattoo on the hearth.

Then everything was quiet. Except for the deep throated purr of the idling chainsaw motor and the hiss and pop of brains frying in the fireplace.

What a morning. I actually saw a Yellow Thrush today. As I wandered into the kitchen I wondered if Danny had left any of those macaroons for me. I was hungry . . .

. . . Suddenly the doorbell rang. As I peered out the side window I saw the UPS truck . . . Uh, Oh!

.