A Christmas Secret

     Many,many years ago, about Christmas time in the Quinn household, my father discovered a strange object in the back of the closet where he hung his coat and hat. It  was sort of question-mark shaped, had a big bow on it, and was about five feet tall. He was puzzled..

    When he asked what it was, my sister Amy and I told him it was a secret and it was his Christmas present. It wasn't really, but he was always asking us what we were getting him as a gift so we thought we would have a great laugh. The object in question was actually a "shepherd's hook" that we had made for Amy's Little Bo Peep Halloween costume. It was made from an old broom stick, a coat hanger, newspaper, wrapping paper, and ribbon.

  So, as the holiday progressed he was constantly asking for hints as to what it was. On the day he opened the "present" and when he got down to the stick and hanger, he could not figure out what it was...so we told him it was a "chicken catcher'...the curved hook of the hanger slid up and down the stick for distance.

  We got such a laugh out of it that it became a tradition to give my Dad some weird funny gift for Christmas each year. The next year one of us found an object that to this day I don't know what it was, but made a great gift. It was made of cast iron, shaped like a half of a hollowed out pear, and had a screw assembly through it. His demand for hints made us really puzzle for answers. We thought perhaps it was some kind of nut cracker. But no one ever was able to figure it out....neither did my father who we thought knew everything.

  One gift was really imaginative. We got him three bottles of Old Spice...each had two tiny handles on them as part of the design, so of course, the hint was...'It has six handles".  We all laughed while he tried to find the answer to that one.

   Christmas at the Quinnery was always fun!