Tight Pants for Jesus, Weiners, Lunkers, & Shlumpadinka Pants

Vogel Family Definitions: (two of many)
What is a lunker?

• Andy's definition: a large catch when ice fishing
• Dawn's definition: something you would flush down the toilet
• Dad's definition: A Christmas miracle (defined as he walks out of the bathroom)
• Dictionary's definition: something unusually large for its kind

What is a weiner? (pronounced vwee-nar)

• My definition: A part of the body that Jack is hoping to lose if he keeps being so annoying
• Mom's definition: a zesty holiday sausage
• Dawn's definition: a saucy delicious naughty at holiday time
• Dictionary's definition: frankfurter

Christmas Eve begins with Dad pulling on his Tight Pants for Jesus and singing the Tights Pants for Jesus song.  Our family of giants pile into the car and complain as it seems to downsize every year.  Marielle sings church songs a la Vogel style (For the lamb who was slain, we forgot his name, bahhhhhhhahhhhleluiah bahhhhhleluiah) during the half hour trek that brings us to Normandale Evangelical Lutheran in Edina, MN.  For once, we roll into the church parking lot a half hour early (truly unheard of when you have Jill Close as a mother) and sit there being oh-so-twenty-first-century as we ditz on our smart phones for the next fifteen minutes.  Dad being the polite little Christian that he is insists that the whole family sit in the back since our church appearances can count for about three days a year and we should give the good spots to the people who actually go to church on a regular basis.  Not only that, since the majority of our family is over the six feet tall and you can count on Auntie Dawn walking in with the processional anthem, it is best if we keep our distractions to a minimum in the back.

I'd like to say that our family really gets the most out of Christmas Eve service, but really we spend that hour and half drawing funny pictures of Santa Claus and Jesus on the offering envelopes, singing the carols in goofy voices, and scoping out the hottest boys during the readings.  Jesus is my homeboy, but sitting in an uncomfortable pew in uncomfortable clothes for that long is just not my thing.

As soon as the service is done, we pile back into the car, complain about the lack of space, and Marielle sings until we end up back hope.  The whole family pulls on their shlumpadinka pants and cozies and we gather around the kitchen counter in silence as we stuff our faces with the fat and cholesterol and sodium-filled snacks.  In true Scandinavian style, Christmas Eve dinner is a real Mexican fiesta... okay that isn't Scandinavian I just liked the sound of saying that.  So we ate queso, and guacamole, and tacos, and talked about corn in our poopies and wore our hair in doinkers which I'm too lazy to explain right now and debated the meaning of the word squishitate etc. etc. etc. blah blah blah.

I'm bored of this blog post I've been writing it for like three days now and I am so not in the mood anymore but I am posting it anyway because I already wrote a crap ton.  Oh yeah, I am pretty sure I heard good ol' Catholic Grandma Bette fart for the first time ever.  I'm afraid to even use the word "suck" in front of her.  She would be mortified if she knew what I heard slip out of her backside on Christmas. muahaha!