If you missed the first two parts of this series, they are here and here.

In the morning, I awoke to the wonderful smells of my uncle Kermit’s Famous Perfectly Round Silver Dollar Pancakes being made in the kitchen. No one else in the house appeared to be awake yet so an idea formed in my head. Since I was a young man with an unhealthy addiction to Dungeons & Dragons, I thought I could begin my training as a master thief (elfish, of course) by sneaking into the kitchen and stealing a delicious pancake without my uncle ever knowing. I decided that this was the perfect opportunity for me to work on my Hiding in Shadows and Move Silently skills. Both were at a meager 30%.

Hopefully, I wouldn’t get caught and need to make a Saving Throw vs. Punishment. I always failed those.

Ninja-like, I crept from the living room sofa bed where my cousins, brother and I were sleeping. By slowly sliding off the bed instead of bouncing off, I avoided waking them or making any squeaking noises that would give away my position to my uncle. My uncle, blissfully unaware of the silent death in Aquaman Underoos sneaking up on him, continued with his pancake ministrations.

I smiled in anticipation of fluffy, pancakey goodness.

Making my way slowly to the kitchen, I stalked my pray as the wolves on the open plains. I moved like a cloud on a windless night, making no sound save my own beating heart. I approached the kitchen door like a wraith, he would never even know I was there. Look at that fool, happily making pancakes. Perhaps I should backstab him with my aqua-slipper while I’m at it. He won’t even suspect…

“Good morning GeekMan! While you’re up why don’t you set the table?”

What?!? He must be a 10th level wizard to detect my stealthy approach. No mortal man could possibly have heard me. Am I not GeekMan, Master Thief of Upper Elronadom? How was this possible?

“Sure, Uncle Kermit. No problem.”

I’ll get you, uncle. Oh, yes. And you shall rue the day you defied me. Do you hear me? Rue! BwahahahaHAHAHAhahaha!

I began setting the table.

A little later my Aunt Miss Piggy joined my Uncle in the kitchen. After a few moments, I heard something that sounded a lot like laughter. Listening a little harder as I set the table in the dining room, I thought I heard my uncle say, “Well, how was I to know? They look the same and what in the world would anyone use that for, anyway?”

My Aunt just laughed harder.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my Uncle had made a mistake that was going to come back and haunt everyone in the house. Especially him and his reputation as the families master chef. A half-hour later, everyone was awake and sitting at the table eagerly awaiting some Christmas morning pancakes. My aunt and uncle brought out the plates piled high with sausage, bacon, eggs, potatoes and pancakes and we attacked the food like Amazonian red army ants on a dead monkey’s corpse.

In my family it’s serve yourself, and quickly, or go hungry.

Usually, when we eat my uncle’s pancakes, we all ooh and ah in admiration of his culinary skills. But this time, as I bit into a pancake, I noticed something peculiar. It didn’t taste the way I remembered it tasting. In fact, it didn’t taste much like a pancake at all. Looking around the table, I saw a look of consternation on almost everyone’s face. We were all still chewing, but no one was swallowing. Looking across the table at my Aunt Miss Piggy, I noticed that she hadn’t touched her pancakes and was just sitting there watching all of us with an almost constipated look on her face. Uncle Kermit’s face turned beet-red as he saw us, one by one stop eating and look at him.

“It’s really not my fault.” He said. “What the hell is Aunt SuLu doing with a whole bottle of Orange Extract in her cabinet?”

My Aunt Miss Piggy laughed so hard that she accidentally knocked over her plate of food onto the floor.

It seems my uncle forgot to read the labels and poured a half bottle of orange extract into the pancake mix instead of vanilla extract. Let me tell you, orange extract and pancakes don’t mix well at all. In fact, mixing orange extract with milk in pancake batter is so god-awful that I think it was used as a method of torture in the Middle Ages. At the very least it’s on par with mixing OJ and toothpaste. My uncle has never lived that one episode down and every time he’s gone into the kitchen since, someone will almost always warn him to read the labels.

He really hates that.

Thank you for taking the time to read about one of my favorite Christmas memories. In the years to come, may your memories be as heartwarming and vibrant to you as this memory has been, and still is, for me.

Here’s to happy memories for everyone. Cheers.

The first part of this story can be found here.

After the monopoly incident we decided that we wouldn’t play any more board games. Instead, we got ready for dinner and sat down at the table to eat. After dinner we had a few hours to kill before midnight so we decided to watch a movie.

Then it was time to open presents.

We’re a very giving family, so everyone had lots and lots of presents both to give out and receive. We had a lot of fun ripping open presents and throwing the wrapping paper all over the living room. Sometimes I think my family loves unwrapping the presents almost as much as the actual presents themselves.

One thing I know for sure is that we love practical jokes.

Now keep in mind that I was about sixteen years old and like anyone that age with a drivers license, the only thing I wanted for Christmas was a car. Due to my many slick, suave and subtle teenage hints earlier in the year, my entire family was fully aware of my desire for a personal form of locomotion.

Especially my favorite aunt, Aunt SuLu.

After all of the presents had been given out and opened, and I had made it known to everyone just how disappointed I was that there was no car for me under the tree, my aunt SuLu handed me an envelope. By the way she looked at me when she handed me the envelope I knew this was something special. I ripped into that envelope like a starving hyena into a week-old buffalo carcass. Inside was a single white piece of paper with the words, “look in the garage” written on it in big, bold, black letters.

My heart skipped a beat and my mouth dropped open.

I screamed like a little girl invited to her first sleepover, dropped the card and took off like a shot for the garage. When I got to the garage I opened the door and ran inside fully expecting to see a brand new car waiting for me. Instead, the garage was bare to the walls with no new car in sight.

But there was something on the floor in the middle of the garage.

With my family standing in the doorway trying in vain to hold back their laughter, I walked over to the item in the middle of the floor. What I found was a nightmare. Resting on top of another white card was a teeny, tiny and very ugly matchbox car. Picking up the car I was able to read what was inscribed on the card.

Gotcha.

For a moment I couldn’t believe it. It just seemed so improbable that my favorite aunt would do something so horrible to me. I mean, wasn’t I her favorite nephew? Weren’t she and I always the ones who played practical jokes on everyone else in the family? Why would she betray me like this?

Then I smiled.

The beauty of this amazing practical joke hit me like a baseball bat to the brain. It was sheer genius. It was simple, practical and funny as hell. I had newfound respect for my aunt SuLu and I knew that she and the rest of my family were waiting for me to give them a reaction worthy of such a great joke. So, with my face red from embarrassment and shame, I looked over to my family and gave them what they wanted.

“Damn,” I said, “that was good.”

Then everyone laughed and made fun of me for the next few hours until we went to sleep. To this day everyone in my family still talks about my special ‘Christmas car’. My mother especially enjoys telling this story because more often than not, she was the butt of my aunt SuLu and my jokes. She’s very happy that I got my comeuppance and that she was there to witness it.

I’m just happy I didn’t break down and cry in the garage.

Now, although my family never did buy me a car when I was a teenager, a few years ago I bought one for my mother. A nice, brand new Infinity QX4. She loves her car very much and I’m really glad I bought it for her, since she’s a wonderful mother and deserves nothing but the best. However, nowadays when she gets me upset, nothing makes me happier than telling her I’m going to take away her toy until she apologizes.

Revenge can be so sweet.

~~Next time, Breakfast.

Everyone has a favorite Christmas memory and I’m no exception. The Christmas I’m going to tell you about is one that happened long ago in my youth and has since become part of the GeekMan family legend. It’s much funnier when I tell it in person, but you’ll just have to imagine for yourselves some of my facial expressions and intonations because… well, I’m not there to tell it, am I? I’ll introduce my family members as they come along in this story, but for right now let’s just dive right in and start off right after my arrival at my aunts house in Upstate New York.

This all takes place when I am roughly 16 years old.

We arrived in the early evening, about five or so, so it wasn’t yet time for dinner. My aunt and uncle, Miss Piggy and Kermit, we’re still in the kitchen cooking, so we had a couple of hours to kill before we ate. Since everyone in my family is a geek, we had a number of games to choose from to keep ourselves occupied. We didn’t have that long before dinner, so we decided that we would play a quick game of Pictionary.

Yessir, we’re a wild bunch alright.

In my family it’s a well known fact that my mother is the absolute worst Pictionary player in history of the world. She can’t draw, is horrible at giving clues and wouldn’t know how to cheat if her life depended on it.

Sweet, loveable, and utterly hopeless at board games pretty much sums up my mom.

No one wanted to have her on their team, so we would always go out of our way to try and convince her not to play. We’d tell her she looked tired, or that she should help out in the kitchen and sometimes we would even threaten to take away her presents if she didn’t stay away from the game.

It never worked, but we kept trying anyway.

For this particular game on this Christmas Eve the teams were split up like this;

Team 1

LuSu (mother of DeeDee and Princess)

Princess (my cousin, six months older than Fishman)

Fishman (my younger brother)

Zappy (my aunt SuLu’s ‘partner’)

Team 2

SuLu (my favorite aunt)

DeeDee (my other cousin, six months older than me)

Mom (my mother)

GeekMan (me)

There were other people there, but in their infinite wisdom, they decided not to play. Mr. Volkswagen, my mother’s boyfriend at the time, had already managed to have four gin & tonic’s in the 20 minutes between our arrival and the beginning of the game, so he was passed out in the basement couch. And Miss Piggy and Kermit were still cooking so they couldn’t play either.

As an aside, it must be noted that my aunt Miss Piggy made the absolute best Spanish rice in the history of the world. In fact, it was so good that during the entire night my mother and I stole all the little green olives from the pot. My aunt knew that my mother and I loved the olives, so she would always make the rice with extra olives just for us to pick out. Of course, that didn’t really help because my mother and I would eat all of them anyway, and there wouldn’t be any olives in the rice by the time dinner rolled around.

Wow, I’m drooling right now.

Anywaste, back to the game. My aunt, cousin and I knew that we were going to lose the game, so we decided to just have fun and let the inevitable happen. During the course of the game we all did the usual shtick people do during Pictionary. We drew stick figures, dollar signs, houses and a whole bunch of other things to help get our points across to our teammates. We all tried to cheat by making grunting noises or gesturing wildly at our teammates, and even with my mother on our team we were doing pretty well. So well in fact, that we were winning the game.

Then mom stepped up to the plate, looked at her card and frowned.

Now, we all knew she couldn’t draw but we still weren’t prepared for what we saw her doing to the drawing board. I’m sure that after her turn the board felt violated. Soiled. Raped. Strange shapes, symbols and wacky patterns appeared on the white paper as if my mother were vomiting black ink like the little girl in The Exorcist. One shape that caught everyone’s attention as soon as she drew it was something that could only be described as a large symbol of male genitalia.

And it was erect.

Basically, that brought the game to an end faster than if my grandmother had suddenly popped out of a cake, stripped naked and danced a jig on the kitchen table. No one knew what to say or do, so we all just looked at the board in an uncomfortable silence. Thankfully, god took pity on us and time ran out. When we all looked at my mother for an explanation, she gestured emphatically at the phallic symbol and said, ”It’s a bird!”

We snickered.

“Well, it is!”

Some giggling.

She pointed at some circles with little squiggles in them, “That’s a happy face!”

We laughed.

“Well, how the hell would you draw ‘The Bluebird of Happiness’?”

Eggnog was spewed from mouths and noses as we collapsed in gales of laughter.

After this we decided that Pictionary was probably not the best game to play. We then decided to try our hands at Monopoly. We set up the board and began playing. After about an hour, something caught my attention.

*sniff sniff*

GeekMan: “Anyone smell that?”

Zappy: “Smell what?”

DeeDee and Princess: “OH MY GOD!”

Mom: “Wow. Ugh. Ewww.”

Aunt SuLu: “Damn! That is foul!”

FishMan: “It smells like ass.”

GeekMan: “Like wide open ass.”

Fishman: “It smells like Mr. Volkswagon after eating burritos!”

SuLu: “But he’s downstairs.”

GeekMan: “Holy crap, it’s coming up through the floorboards!”

We then spent ten minutes screaming out as many rude and disgusting fart jokes at Mr. Volkswagon’s expense as we could. It was only then that we realized that my Aunt LuSu had been unnaturally quiet.

Too quiet.

Almost as one, we stopped laughing and looked in her direction. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor and trying so hard to hold back her laughter that her face was redder than a baboons butt. She was shaking with suppressed giggles like a human-shaped Jello mold and tears were streaming down her face like tiny rivers of shame. When she realized that we knew, she opened up her mouth and managed to stutter four words.

“It juh… just puh… puh… popped out.”

Then she laughed so hard that she fell over backwards with her hands on her ankles and her legs still crossed. As her back hit the floor she let loose one of the loudest farts in the history of modern man. The smell traveled at the speed of light and hit us like an atomic bomb. Paint fell from the walls and small woodland animals outside dropped dead in their tracks. We all gagged and ran for the exits in the type of panic usually reserved for life-threatening emergencies involving sinking ships or re-runs of Alf or Punky Brewster.

I will never play board games with my family again. Ever.

~~ Next time, opening presents…