Christmas Highlights - A Gift
I’m about to commit what I’m sure is a blogging faux pas - I’m putting up three posts in a row. Sorry.
If you’ve ever spent any time at the Mingledorff house, you start to realize that a prime pastime is telling (and retelling and retelling) family stories. More often than not, the climax of the story is that the storyteller wet his or her pants, but there is enough variety that even when you hear the same story, it’s good for side-splitting laughter.
So last year, Michelle had the idea to immortalize these stories and have them printed up as a Christmas present for Mom and Dad Mingledorff. She spent February to October pestering us all to write down our memories, and everybody really came through. Somebody transcribed stories told by Ryan and Kaylyn, and even Russell contributed from the mission field. We ended up with over 60 stories. Then Michelle and I found a short-run printer online, and we edited and typeset all the stories, and we published Around the Kitchen Table: Mingledorff Memories. The UPS man delivered the box of books just in time to wrap it up and put it under the Christmas tree.
It sure was a lot of work for everybody, but it made it all worth to see Mom and Dad get emotional when they opened it, and it was fun to see everybody reading and laughing about the stories over Christmas break.
But I have to confess a deep, dark secret: One of the editors who will remain unnamed (though the name starts with N and ends with "ate") forgot to insert one of the stories. So I here post the never-before-published Missing Story.
If you’ve ever spent any time at the Mingledorff house, you start to realize that a prime pastime is telling (and retelling and retelling) family stories. More often than not, the climax of the story is that the storyteller wet his or her pants, but there is enough variety that even when you hear the same story, it’s good for side-splitting laughter.
So last year, Michelle had the idea to immortalize these stories and have them printed up as a Christmas present for Mom and Dad Mingledorff. She spent February to October pestering us all to write down our memories, and everybody really came through. Somebody transcribed stories told by Ryan and Kaylyn, and even Russell contributed from the mission field. We ended up with over 60 stories. Then Michelle and I found a short-run printer online, and we edited and typeset all the stories, and we published Around the Kitchen Table: Mingledorff Memories. The UPS man delivered the box of books just in time to wrap it up and put it under the Christmas tree.
It sure was a lot of work for everybody, but it made it all worth to see Mom and Dad get emotional when they opened it, and it was fun to see everybody reading and laughing about the stories over Christmas break.
But I have to confess a deep, dark secret: One of the editors who will remain unnamed (though the name starts with N and ends with "ate") forgot to insert one of the stories. So I here post the never-before-published Missing Story.
He’s Got Rice on His Face
by Michelle
Once when Dad was a teenager, Aunt Jenny had some sort of lunch or dinner at school that she was supposed to bring her dad to. Grandpa was working, so Dad went with her instead. He was feeling slightly awkward, since he was just her brother, not her dad. That discomfort turned to all-out humiliation, however, when a girl looked at him, pointed her finger and said loud enough for the whole room to hear, “He’s got rice on his face!”
I don’t really know what happened after that, because by that point we’re always laughing too hard to care.
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