The Family Reunion

Every year at Christmas time my mother’s family would gather at our home for the “Bell Family Reunion”. She had eleven brothers and sisters and since the family believed in being fruitful and multiplying we would have close to sixty guests for the multi-day festivities. Approximately, a week before each gathering my father would visit with each of our neighbors to forewarn them and to humbly ask if we could use part of their trash cans (in the alley) because the consumption of Coors beer would be staggering. Of course, we had one tea-toting neighbor who would annually give permission for any kind of non-alcohol trash but simply refused to allow a beer can in her garbage. After enduring the annual temperance lecture my father would assure her that he would personally examine the trash before it left our house.

The family reunion also served as a great learning tool. Apparently one of my personality flaws is that I would badger people, usually against their better judgement, into doing things they normally would not do. This was definitely the case surrounding my first and only use of snuff. My Uncle Fred had always dipped snuff. At the reunion of my 5^th year I would continually ask Uncle Fred for a “pinch” of what had to be a miracle concoction. Finally, he gave in and to the best of my knowledge, within seconds after the snuff hit my tongue I was running through the house screaming for water. A lesson learned.

With the number of children in the family the Christmas Eve present opening event would last for hours. Likewise, we always had a visit from Santa Claus. Uncle Fred always had car trouble on Christmas Eve and would miss the event. Anyway, this is the story that they gave us until the year that Uncle Fred exceeded his tolerance level for great quantities of beer and ended up on our roof looking for a chimney to slide down. Since we didn’t have a fireplace the angry Santa didn’t play close attention to the fact that we had a rather steep roof and he slipped and fell off the roof into my mother’s flower bed. A disheveled Santa stumbled into the house with a string of colorful words coming from his mouth. In what seemed like a few seconds he was led back to his sleigh by several of my uncles as Uncle Floyd explained to us that since Santa had so many houses to get to that night he could only make a brief appearance at our place. Soon with the gifts flowing around the room the Santa incident was out of our minds for the rest of the reunion. On the 26^th the families started pulling out to return to their homes that ranged from Texas to Illinois to Colorado to other towns in New Mexico.