a christmas calamity many years ago

many christmases ago, my kid sister and i wrote to santy and listed all of the bad-ass toys that we wanted. my list was basically the entire crate & barrel catalogue (how lovely it would be to run my hands up and down those fine linens! and all the drinks that i could sip from that exquisite glassware!) but my kid sister’s list only had a single item—hamsters. she kept annoying our folks about how cute the hamsters would be and how she and them would have tea parties (or whatever it is that girls and rats do with eachother). she even preëmptively gave them the ridiculous monikers, honey & cutie.

my dear old parents decided to go through with the hamster thing and bought my kid sister two she-hamsters from the same litter. but what they didn’t know (and the pet store chucklehead didn’t tell them) was that females from the same litter are not very friendly towards one another. in fact they are downright vicious.

24 hanging chads on our advent calender later, it was christmas day at last. my folks thought it would be a real gas to wrap up the hamsters and their cage so that my kid sister would be able to unwrap the surprise (a surprise that, incidentally, she had already gotten wind of (literally)). my kid sister and i ran downstairs and i bolted over to what could only be a kitchenaid professional 600 stand mixer!!!!!! and my kid sister ran to a rattling package shrieking, “my haaaaaaammmmsters! cuuuutie! hooooney!” and tore away the wrapping paper with childish glee.

you can guess what happened next. the hamsters, not happy with being in a cage together to begin with, started freaking out when my dear old parents entombed them with foil wrapping paper and they went cage-match berserker all over eachother. so what my kid sister got first thing on christmas morning was a pen full of bloody hamsters, one of them slain, the other writhing in a pool of blood, which thankfully was absorbed by plentiful wood shavings. cutie was no more, but her christmas spirit continues to haunt the ganans every year.

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so long chummys, i’m off to do some traveling in a country that i shan’t name (so as not to tip off the paparazzi) but will mention that it is located on the 20th parallel north. i wish you and your affiliates an outlandish holiday season and a happy new decade.