The holidays are behind us. The turkey is gone. Everyone has
gone home.
Hear that? It’s the sound of quiet. You have your house back to
yourself! And hopefully still in one piece.
Family is definitely what makes the holidays special. But if
you’re anything like me, a little bit always goes a long way.
Sometimes you have to make the best of a situation. Or better yet,
beat your loved ones at their own game.
The holidays are behind us. The turkey is gone. Everyone has gone home.
Hear that? It’s the sound of quiet. You have your house back to yourself! And hopefully still in one piece.
Family is definitely what makes the holidays special. But if you’re anything like me, a little bit always goes a long way. Sometimes you have to make the best of a situation. Or better yet, beat your loved ones at their own game.
Which leads me to a classic family story. On Christmas Day, my and my husband Chris’ families sat around the dinner table sharing stories from their youth. My husband’s Aunt Bobbie recalled a time when she had just graduated from college.
She was living at home and her father, Chris’ grandfather, Bob Olden, thought it best that Bobbie, or Roberta as her family called her, spend her days pounding the pavement looking for a job.
But after college, Aunt Bobbie thought she enjoyed a well-deserved break. She stayed up into the wee hours of the night watching old black-and-white movies on television. She awoke long after the breakfast dishes had been cleared. There at the table, she would find the Want Ads that her father had skimmed hours ago. He had been thoughtful enough to circle a few choice jobs in red – a not-so-gentle hint to his daughter.
But the warning went unheeded. One afternoon, Bob said enough is enough. Unbeknownst to Bobbie, he walked into the den and cut the electrical cord to the television set.
You have to imagine Aunt Bobbie’s shock when she came in to watch television that night only to find the set dead. She yelled, she protested, but her father stood his ground. He said not only would she not watch television, the entire family wouldn’t until she had found a job.
The next day, Aunt Bobbie schemed and plotted until she came up with the most devious and perfect way to get back at dear, old Dad.
If there is one possession that Bob loved more than anything else, it was his organ. It was a really fancy one that both he and Chris’ grandma played.
Aunt Bobbie knew how much he treasured it. That’s why what she was about to do was so perfect.
She went out to the garage and found an old heater. She cut its electrical cord and brought it into the living room where the organ was situated. She carefully placed the real electrical cord for the organ underneath the organ. Then she snipped the fake cord in half and placed it neatly over the keys.
That evening she nervously helped her mother make dinner while waiting for her father to return home from work. At the stroke of six o’clock, he walked in and said hello. Then he walked into the living room.
“Roberta!” he bellowed. “Roberta, you come in here!”
“Yes, Dad. Did you want something?” Aunt Bobbie asked as sweetly as can be, skipping into the living room.
“Look what you did! Just look at this!” Bob said, shaking the frayed cord in his fist.
“Oh, relax, Dad. See, the organ’s fine,” she said, revealing the real cord still intact.
Bob let out a deep groan and shudder and walked away, still shaking with fury.
He returned moments later, still shaking, and said grudgingly, “That was pretty good.”
“And, a week later, I got a job and Dad had the television fixed,” she told us.
Encircled around our dining room table, we all laughed at the thought of Grandpa Olden praising Aunt Bobbie for outsmarting him.
“She put her college education to good use,” Leslie, Chris’ sister said.
So, I’ll tell you what the moral of this little family tale isn’t: that it’s OK to destroy electronic equipment to get your way.
The lesson here is to turn any situation that seems pretty rotten on its head. Step back and look at it from another angle. Shake things up. Go a little extreme. Just make sure that the damage isn’t irrevocable.
