Me and My Mod Hair Ken

Let’s crawl into the “way back” machine and take a little trip back to Christmas 1973. That’s the year, under our aluminum Christmas tree (more on that in the future) Santa had finally left for me a Ken doll. Barbie, of course, was no novice to the dating world. She’d been spending time with my cousin Don’s G.I Joe any chance she got. But in 1973, the man who was modeled specifally for her walked into her life.

He wasn’t the blonde Ken doll with plastic hair with which you’re probably most familiar. I had a special Ken doll…the “Mod Hair Ken” with combable, brunnette hair. I mean this was the seventies!! I always wondered why he was mod and just recently discovered that it was because he had mod length hair. Too funny!!!

He was decked out in a beautiful brown outfit…brown pants, brown checked jacket with great wide lapels, and a white mock turtleneck dickie!!! Yes, Mod Hair Ken had a damned dickie. What moron came up with this thing??

It gets worse…

Mod Hair Ken also came with press-on facial hair. You read correctly…PRESS-ON FACIAL HAIR!!!! He could don a mustache, a beard, a mustache and beard, and/or lamb chop sideburns.

Why would a little girl want a Ken doll who wears a dickie and has press-on sideburns? He looked like a damned swinger!!! Were the Ken doll creaters at Mattel on LSD?!?!?

Needless to say, that combable hair quickly became cuttable hair as soon as I pulled out my handy dandy safety scissors. By the time I was through with him, Mod Hair Ken looked like he’d laid down with dogs and got up with a severe case of the mange.

Poor Mod Hair Ken would often be the pilot of my Barbie airplane stumbling down the aisle with only one sideburn and half a mustache, barefoot, and looking like a homeless mangy mutt. Or sometimes the driver of the Barbie camper drunkenly setting up the plastic table and popping the canopy wearing only his lovely brown pants and receiving a severe sunburn to the bare spots on his scalp and hairless, well-defined chest.

Soon he was tossed aside and just became a mean guy who would come out of the pile to be the guy that high fashion Barbie laughed at openly. He was definitley the joke of all the other dolls. Even the father of the sunshine family with his blonde bowl haircut and round, empty, blue eyes was more popular with the chicks that Mod Hair Ken.

What did Barbie decide to do? Well, Barbie ran back into the stiff and figid arms of G.I Joe and lived happily ever after.

Chick out…

Santa's Second Home

Have you heard of the Elf on the Shelf?? It’s a elf doll that that you can buy at most any book store. You move the elf around every night and the kids think he’s really watching them and scaring them into behaving for the holidays.

Well this is some new-fangled ploy that didn’t exist back when my now 24-year old nephew was a little boy. We had something even better. It involved a cheap Santa suit bought at an after Christmas clearance sale, my father, and some pitiful theatrics that could fool only a child under the age of 6. Believe me when I tell you that anytime he spent time at my parent’s house, he was a gosh darn angel and here’s why…

One year my mother picked up a clearance-priced Santa suit at Walmart the day after Christmas. Let me go ahead and say it was a sorry excuse for a Santa suit. The material was thin flannel that was almost transparent. The belt and spats were made of cheap plastic that looked like they had been cut from a black garbage bag, and the beard and hair had to be as flammable s gasoline fumes. To us it looked ridiculous but to my 3 year old nephew it looked like….magic!

The next Christmas my father went upstairs, donned the cheap, flammable Santa suit and came downstairs to greet my nervous and terrified nephew. We thought he was only nervous and terrified because this shabby excuse for Santa was in the house. Little did we know…*smirk*

The next week, my little nephew was afraid to go upstairs and he lingered around the bottom of the steps looking up with a look of wonder and a look of horror on his face…we’ll just call it wonderful horror. This is when we found out what was going on.

I tried to get him to go upstairs. NO WAY!!! He looked at me and said, “No, Clausen (that’s what he called him) is up there!” He thought that shabby-assed Santa lived upstairs in my parent’s home! How funny, right???

That’s when our plan was hatched. Everytime he started acting like a pint-sized asshole we would yell up the stairs to Santa. “He Santa!! Do you see this??? He’s misbehaving!!” Immediately he would settle down. Oh…my…God!! This was wonderful. Genius!!!!!

You’re probably wondering how we kept “Santa” hidden. Well, any time the nephew would go upstairs Santa would disappear, of course. Children couldn’t be seeing Santa unless he’s at the mall, in a parade, or on TV for God’s sake…everyone knows that!!

Christmas came and went. We couldn’t pull that little trick anymore. Wait a minute…maybe we could.

Hell, he thought Santa lived up there when he wasn’t at the North Pole. If he thought Santa lived there in December why couldn’t he live there in February??? June??? September?? The back bedroom upstairs at my parent’s house could be the jolly old elf’s friggin’ bachelor pad to get away from those damned elves, ratty reindeer, and bitch of a woman to whom he was married (eat, Papa, eat!!!). Why couldn’t he live up there all year long? Let’s give the fat fudge wad a year long lease!!! The kid was only 3 years old. He had no grasp of time. We could keep Christmas alive forever in my parents house!! And we did…

As the year went along we started adding theatrical elements when he started to be an irritating little shit. I would go upstairs to “talk” to Santa. I would take cover in the back bedroom, stomp around, and yell out in a super, deep voice, “Ho Ho Ho”!!!

The nephew would be running around outside in the middle of July acting like a mad man flinging sand and dirt all over everything. I would run into the house yelling, “Santa watch him. He’s doing it again!!!”

Every single time he would turn from a devil into an angel….okay maybe a terrified angel but he wasn’t misbehaving anymore. It was downright amazing.

He was invisible for 364 days a year and on that one one fateful day, Shabby Santa would emerge from the upstairs to scare the shit out of the kid and confirm that he did indeed live there. Life was good!!

We kept that little dream alive for about 3 or 4 years. It was a sad, sad day when we found out the nephew didn’t believe in Santa anymore. We didn’t care so much that he didn’t believe anymore. We had lost our gold!! How were we going to get him to behave now???

I often laugh about those days and I really hope my nephew has forgotten all those antics. You see I have no kids of my own and expect him to take care of me when I’m an old, dried-up lady. I guess the joke will be ok me when he says I can just move in with Shabby Santa, huh??

Chick out…

Baby Jesus, Three Wiseman, and Illegal Fireworks

Now that the Christmas season is upon us I’ve been reminiscing about the holidays a bit. I plan on sharing a few of those stories with you over the next few days.

Today I’ll start with the tale of the Christmas fireworks. You read that correctly….fireworks. I don’t mean family feuds that take place over the holidays. I’m talking about Roman candles, bottle rockets, firecrackers, etc. Oh my…hillbillies can ring in Christmas like nobody else.

I grew up in a fireworks-free state. Yep, fireworks were and still are illegal in the great state of Virginia. Does that stop anyone? Hmmph! Hillbillies are not afraid of the law…we laugh in the face of the law.

My family had a long standing Christmas Eve tradition. While the females finished up dinners, shopping, and wrapping gifts, the men headed across the border into Tennessee to buy the illegal stuff of kids’ Christmas dreams.

We would gather at my grandmother’s house on Christmas Eve and sometime around 9:00 or 10:00 o’clock that night my father and his two drunken brothers would wander outside and start blasting fireworks. What’s more fun than fireworks? Fireworks being lit by drunken grown ass men. Ever seen a drunken man run from a rocket after he lights it? Let me tell you that it puts the “cheer” in holiday cheer.

I really miss those days. Christmas…drunkenness…potentially lethal and/or physically maiming actions. That says fun!!!

This tradition carried onto the youth of my now 24-year old nephew. Every Christmas Eve my father, brother, and nephew would pile into Daddy’s pickup and make a run for the border. That night after the sun had set we would head out to the backyard to start the festivities.

I’ll never forget how my nephew’s face would light up as Roman candles vomited those glowing orbs of goodness into the cold, dark sky. How he would squeal with delight as the bottle rockets blasted off like the Gemini space capsules of the the 60s. How he would run in circles of delight as we lit entire packs of firecrackers and threw them on the ground.

Then one fateful year we set off some sort of demon rocket. He clapped his little hands as it launched into the sky. Then…it…disappeared!! OH SHIT!

Let me explain that I grew up in the town limits of an old company town. That means that most all houses inside the town limits were rows and rows of homes that looked alike and were built very close together. To better explain…you couldn’t take a piss in your yard without about 10 neighbors seeing you take the whiz.

So here were are in the dark, shooting off illegal balls of fire, around homes that were built roughly 100 years ago. Needless to say…we gathered up all the evidence, ran in the house, locked the doors, and turned off all the lights. We sat huddled by the police scanner waiting with baited breath to hear the fire department called out on Christmas Eve to douse the flames of someone else’s home or to hear the police called out to investigate the shenanigans of a bunch of fireball toting hillbillies.

The police scanner was silent. Whew…we were safe!! That rocket was gone and would never be seen or heard from again.

The next morning (Christmas morning) we received a call from my brother. He was at his in-law’s home, which was located about 100 yards from my parents’ home up on a hill. He called to inform us that when they arrived they found that fateful rocket stuck in his in-law’s front yard!! That bastard rocket had come back to haunt us!!!

I thought my mother was going to have a damned heart attack. We had nearly burned down the home of my sister-in-law’s parents. Needless to say…we’ve never shot of fireworks again.

Christmas Eve is now on a shell of what it once was because we’re now afraid to laugh in the face of the law. I guess we’ve become a bit civilized over the years. Nah, we were scared into civilization that cold Christmas day. We all still have the memories though and memories never die.

Chick out…