Merry Christmas!

Here’s Teri and Cindy a few years ago, standing by our fireplace and holding onto their Christmas stockings, knowing they would be full on Christmas morning. That was such an exciting time for all of us. We always opened our presents on Christmas Eve. Before we all went to bed, we put out cookies for Santa when he stopped by in the night. On Christmas morning, there would be presents under the tree from Santa and the stockings would be full. Christmas morning the girls always rushed from bed into the living room to see what had happened. It was exciting, fun and wild. But one Christmas, things took a bad turn. When Cindy took her stocking down from the fireplace, she found it was full of switches! She was devastated and I was bewildered. What the hell happened to our wonderful little Christmas moment?

Well, this is what happened. Teri had read that Santa gave bad kids switches in their stockings instead of presents. So my sweet little Teri thought it would be a fun joke on Cindy. Teri thinks Cindy was about 8 years old at the time. So Teri went to the woods and broke off several small branches. She came home and set her alarm clock on Christmas Eve for 3:00am. Teri had an alarm clock? When it rang, she was up and out to the stockings where she emptied all the presents out of Cindy’s and filled it with switches. Teri says she didn’t expect Cindy to become hysterical the next morning, but Cindy did! Teri finally confessed after Darrell and I freaked out too. We wondered how someone could get into our house and were even suspecting one of Darrell’s football players! And how could we have slept through the whole thing?

I can’t remember what happened after that, but I know the presents were put back in the stocking and we started all over again. Teri and Cindy made up – I don’t remember how long it took, but probably not too long. That never happened again. The whole family will be together this Christmas, and I’m making it my job to keep a close eye on Teri. No one knows what she may have planned for Cindy this time.