A Case of the Christmas Giggles

Dreaming of a White Christmas

Remember mix tapes?  I used to make them all the time when I was a kid.  When I created a new masterpiece, I took a ball point pen and poked out the little plastic tab on the side of the tape to make my creation permanent. 

One Christmas when I was little, my grandparents gave our family the gift of a tape player and a tape of Christmas songs.  It was, apparently, recorded at home in some lady's basement.  We could tell.  Along with the novice production, the singing was not much better.  The lady had a warbly and at times screechy voice.  



Hoping for the perfect gift



At first my brother and I were disappointed.  The tape probably would have been cast aside except for one thing:  Bobby and I discovered the little plastic tab still intact on the side of the tape.  This was a perfectly good cassette!  We could dub over the entire thing!

We hit the play button and listened to the piano plinking and plunking as the lady sang with dramatic flourish...

"And the angels..."  she crooned.  Quickly we hit record and updated the lyrics with our own childlike melody...

"Laughed so hard they wet their pants!" 

And then we laughed so hard, we almost wet our own pants.  We spent hours with our new gift that afternoon.  Lying on our stomachs on the living room carpet, we rewrote the words to every song and inserted our new, improved version onto the tape.

I hope you had a Merry Christmas! By now the gifts are unwrapped and maybe, just maybe some of them weren't perfect.  In our house, the basketball socks we ordered for Jack were too small.  Aunt Julie's hot chocolate mix exploded in the package during shipping, covering everything in a film of cocoa.   I watched the kids open their gifts--beautiful handknit hats--and couldn't help but laugh that they smelled delicious too. 

 Merry Christmas!  I wish for all of you memories with family and friends, filled with unexpected laughter.  I think the angels would approve.