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):

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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.