I never understood the concept behind the Advent Calendar.
To me, it was just an overpriced fancy package of candy.
Not really much of a calendar, because you shred the numbers to get to the candy, and once you eat the first one… there’s always the second one… and third… and fourth…
Pretty soon, you’re sitting there on the first of the month, face covered in chocolate, and the whole calendar’s been torn to shreds.
There’s supposed to be Bible verses in there, something to do with the shapes of the candy treats?
Whatever. Hand me another calendar.
I’m hungry.
Author: R.
The Not So Merry Go Round
Here we sit on the merry-go-round.
Where some aren’t so merry at all.
Some kids are reaching for brass rings.
Others hold on and laugh.
And then there’s those crybabies, clutching with fear and screaming:
Moooooooooommmmmmmyyyyyyyy!
I’ll just sit on the bench, wondering.
All those tattoos on the arm of the operator.
The smoke oozing out from the machinery.
The gears grind louder.
Which the music almost covers up.
It’s a lot happening at once.
I just want to sit here on the bench.
And watch everything go by.
And listen to the music.
With a few folks, humming along.
The Stone Church
We founded the church on Peter, commanding the funeral masons to shape and polish his remains into a single massive cornerstone.
The Ancestors are hauled from The Garden of Memories, and they are also used as building blocks for the church.
Soon, The Birthing Mine is producing more blocks for the church than children. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I saw a young stoneman walking about.
The Teachers, replaced by the priests as the authorities of our land, were commanded to volunteer themselves for quarrying.
Some resisted, and they were pulverized to provide pebbles for the walkways.
Weekly Challenge #240 – “Holiday”
Welcome to the Weekly Challenge Number Two Hundred and Forty, where I post a topic and then challenge you to come up with a 100 word story based on that topic.
The topic this week was Holiday!
Go ahead and listen to them and then vote for your favorites (multiple selections are allowed):
[polldaddy poll=4160663]
And if you want to spam your social networks with this episode, use the Share buttons at the end of the post.
Zackmann
The hog looked scared. He had a that horrified and appalled look in his eyes like a person
reading a sick horror novel gets. I think he knows what the presidential pardon meant for him.
No one would pardon him and he was innocent of everything. You think that politicians would
have more respect for his kind but no they always want to cut their pork or put lipstick on them.
The hog knew when the president pardoned those stupid useless turkey, it was his hammy ass
on the line.
What do you think they where going to serve, eggplant?
My least favorite holiday is a celebration of treating people like cattle in a line to the slaughter
mixed with some bait and switch. It celibates commercialism at its worst.
It starts with the decorative paper mailed out to the unsuspecting public with the lies of cheap
electronic devices that conveniently won’t be in the stores, then tricking otherwise intelligent
people to stand in line for what seems like forever and finally the merchants chanting their
condolences of “Sorry, we have none in the back”. It happens every year with few wise enough
to stay home on Black Friday.
AM Earley
General stores with Christmas starting in July – bad. Specialty stores for holiday décor all year round – good. With this in mind we present to you:
Happy Everything.
In addition to the regular one holiday each décor, we provide cross décor. This is especially great when you don’t have time to change décor each month. We have shamrock valentines, Easter bunnies carrying jack-o-lanterns, and fireworks for every cultures’ New Years and nations’ Independence Days. Our spinning trees have fours sides of decor so you can have a different side facing the window each season. And our resin “Happy Everything” statue can stay outside all year long and represent everything.
Come on in we’ll show you.
Tom
My first truly adult job was during the holiday season of 1970. They needed extra check out clerks at the locale E. J. Korvetts. The garden/ hardware department had three cash registers stations. The last station was literally the last station in the department chain. It spent all but 2 weeks under a gray velt cover thus it was shinny and new but more important it ran smoothly and didn’t jab up. Night Floor mangers hated this station. It had the only cash draw with a three key lock. That meant three mangers had to be present at closing time.
Katwood
I love spending the holidays with my family. We all gather at my house, needing a few tables lined up end to end to fit everyone. The friendly fights over food, the good natured teasing and tormenting and then the after dinner activities. (Snowball fights if it’s cold enough, paintball wars if it’s not) The real fun, however, is preparing the food. We all work in concert to get it done on time, making sure everything is at its best. We do always have to make sure that we get all of the bullet fragments out of the meat, though.
Danny
The Holidays. Time for the only prodigal son to return home to his elderly parents, married for 62 years, something you often don’t see in this day and age. Time to reflect. Despite the failed business, the pending foreclosure, the persistent health problems, the uncertainty of my future, what do I have to be grateful for? To be able to sit down and have dinner with my parents over the holidays, to share great times together, along with my Maltese, Danny, the real Dwyer, life isn’t so bad. It carries on, despite the hardships, I’m damn lucky to be alive.
Steven
“How do you decide which direction to pray?”
Abdul shrugged, floating in the starship cabin. “Towards Earth.
Close enough, I guess.” He rolled up his mat and looked at Joseph.
“How do you decide when it’s the Sabbath? Do you use Greenwich Mean
Time?”Joseph laughed at his station. “Of course not. You use Jerusalem time.”
Mary looked over her shoulder. “Both of you hush. It’s Christmas today.”
The men glanced at each other, then her. “Relativistic time
distortion,” they said together.The ship dropped out of FTL. Earth shone before them.
“You’re all wrong,” Sarah said. “It’s Homecoming Day.”
TJ
The six bowls of chocolate pudding sat covered on the windowsill. The
children dusted the Highest Places They Could Reach while the ceremonial
chicken chow mein was prepared and ladled over rice. As they ate, they
recounted their favorite memories of the past year, which mom would
include in the Christmas letter. Then the pudding was eaten during the
traditional watching of “The Princess Bride,” after which dad headed
out and fired up the snow blower.Yes, the First Blizzard of the Year was irritating in other ways, but
Sarah’s family had found a way to make it a holiday.
Norval Joe
My grand mum from England lived with our family when I was growing up. She had a lot of unusual expression she liked to use. Some were embarassing, like the one, “Keep your pecker up” that somehow actually ment “Keep smiling.”
She used one expression when she would rearange the furniture, which seemed to happen way too often. She would say “A change is as good as a holiday.”
She didn’t mean a holiday like Christmas. She called a vacation, like visiting second cousins in Bakersfield, a holiday.
Best Holiday we ever had was when she moved back to England.
Planet Z
The Museum hired me to collect concert and theater footage.
They send me back in time to record the greats before they were great, or who came before recording was possible.
Lilian Russell on Broadway.
Mozart in Vienna.
Shakespeare at The Globe.I’ve seen them all.
And, so have you.
Every now and then, I get to pick my assignments.
Jesus and Caesar are still beyond our reach for the moment, but Henry Clay’s orations are not to be missed.
And then, an evening in the Cabaret with Billie Holiday.
Lady sings the blues, and I ride the chronostream again.
Into The Woods
Mom and Dad didn’t want no silly child. Oh no that just wasn’t an option. So they signed little Timmy up for Baby Outward Bound. B.O.B. takes an airplane full of six year olds fly over Northern North Dakota drops them from 1500 feet with a full army field pack. Six weeks later while Mom and Dad were slipping expressos on the desk they were to say the least unprepared for the return of Baby Timmy or should I say TimBo. His face was stripped with deer’s blood and keep starring at them with a crooked smile.
Me not Happy.
The Vault
I haven’t seen Mother in years, but one day I’ll remember the combination to the lock on the vault I put her in.
I thought about calling a locksmith, but that would just put him in danger of mother.
And me as well, I suppose, since it has been a while since I last drank.
She used to scream so loud, you could hear her through the thick iron door. But now, she’s far to weak and frail from the thirst to make a sound.
And if I let her out, I know I will be punished for this… naughtiness.
Timeshifted
When the time machine exploded, the research team told you I was dead, my atoms scattered throughout history.
I was badly hurt, sure, but there’s great medical care in the future. All kinds of advanced Star Trek stuff here.
You can hardly see the scars from where they regrew my arm, and this new eye is as good as the old one… even better, with the anti-aging treatments.
If only you’d have held on. They could have cured that cancer.
Instead, I wasn’t there to help you though it.
You killed yourself, and I’m laying a flower on your grave.
Charity Begins Somewhere Else
Every year, we set up a tent in the middle of the city.
The smell of freshly-roasted turkey, baked stuffing, and sweet potatoes fills the air.
This brings out the homeless, lonely, and poor in droves.
We invite them in and they sit down.
We make them wait for a while.
When they’re good and hungry, we ask them to bow their heads and then we feed them…
Into massive circus cannons.
We launch them everywhere… into the river, out into the dump.
Pretty much anywhere but here.
Good riddance.
Then, we sit down and eat our own Thanksgiving meal.
Look In The Mirror
I pour the white dust out on to the mirror and quickly chop it into lines.
One by one, they vanish up my nose.
I let the rush carry me for a minute and then sniff whatever I can off of the mirror before putting it away.
That’s when I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror.
My eyes are bloodshot.
My face is thin and gray.
I barely recognize myself. What have I done?
That’s the moment where I make the promise never to do it again.
I’ll never look at myself in the mirror after doing cocaine.
Uncle Artie
Uncle Artie was a man of the carnival. He traveled the country from coast to coast so many times, and there wasn’t a sucker’s dollar he couldn’t take.
When he died, his body was cremated and the ashes put into one of three urns.
His lawyer shuffled the urns around, and we chose.
Aunt Gladys came up empty.
Shuffle again. My dad thought he had it. Nope.
Unlike those two, Artie taught me all his tricks. I had the winner, and walked away with ten million dollars.
And his ashes.
(Don’t flush them all at once. They’ll clog the drain.)