FOR CHRISTMAS EVE, REMEMBERING SOME YULETIDE ADVENTURES WITH A DOG AND PEOPLE, TOO

EDITION OF CHRISTMAS EVE, 2024 [PetPowellPress] At readlarrypowell.com we have a ton of Christmas Eve memories.  We've been fortunate. Let me edit that sentence. We've been blessed. All of us -- readers and writers.
Speaking of blessed, I'll shortly cite a lesson in Latin pronunciation. Yes, it's connected to Christmas.
#1 THE DOG WE GOT FOR CHRISTMAS 2009 -- Regular visitors to our website have seen frequent references to
our wonderfully sweet (now old, as am I) dog Porche Noel (that's her with ears almost as large as mine).
Her name was inspired by the fact that the starving, mistreated, dog was found on our front porch at Christmas. To get to our feral cat food buffet, this scrawny and hurting dog squeezed through the bars on the porch gate and ate all the cat food and was suddenly too wide to squeeze out again. My partner in rescue and all else, Martha, came home from a pre-Christmas errand and parked in the garage. She walked up the steps from the garage, came into the living room and asked me, "What's with the dog on the porch?"  
"What dog?" I asked. We opened the living room door, this hungry, limping, ailing dog came into the house and has now been my dog for long, long time. She's also Martha's dog. A Christmas gift to us both. 
#2 LOOK, UP IN THE SKY? There was a time when people looked up to see more than an odd drone display in the December sky. 
If you think Christmas Eve is exciting for one kid, have yourself a set of twin boys. I got to wait for Santa Claus with a set of little boy twins, Bret and Bart. My little boys are now grown-ups -- but sometimes during the holidays, when I look at their laughing 53-year-old faces, I think I can still see them sneaking glimpses at the sky -- perhaps wondering if this is the year they finally see Santa and the sleigh landing on the roof.  (I was also the big brother to two little brothers -- I know what anticipation looks like on Christmas Eve.)

#3 SPEAKING OF ANTICIPATION: My entire professional life was not spent in newspaper newsrooms. In the mid-to-late 1960s, it helped if a young reporter had a part-time job to pay for college AND a car. One of my jobs was working on the delivery truck at Montgomery Ward in Texarkana. My boss on the truck was John, a WWII veteran and father of one of my schoolmates. I got the job because the manager of the delivery department was one of my Sunday School teachers at Texarkana's Highland Park Baptist Church, Mr. Simms. 
One of our Christmas Eve deliveries early that shift was taking a big piece of trendy furniture known as a "console stereo" up two flights of pre-war-styled, nearly 90-degree angle from earth, cement stairs. Risky business, but we made it and the upstairs door of the two-story dwelling was opened by three gleeful sisters barely into their teens. 
Their mom was watching as we took the "stereo" to the designated wall. These girls were absolutely elated and giddy with nervous anticipation.  And John stuck the electric plug into the wall socket and said, "Y'all need to try this out!" 
The youngest girl -- gripping the unopened latest Beatles record -- was ready and giggly with happiness. The other two sisters knew how to "work a stereo unit" and made it ready for their sis to put the 33 1/3rd platter onto the spindle. One turned the "on dial" and the other turned the volume up and pretty quickly Momma was beaming happily as her three kids celebrated The British Stereo Invasion. 
#4 THE DOOR TO CHRISTMAS: Having seen the happiness of a stereographic Christmas, John drove us away from the two-story house in Texarkana, Texas, to our next stop: a wood-frame one-story home on the edge of a pasture in rural Arkansas about an hour east of Texarkana, Ark. Speed limit was 55 mph back then, I recall.
John expertly cut the big cardboard box off the giant refrigerator/freezer combo. It was a Christmas gift from a hard-working husband to his hard-working wife for Christmas. We saw pride in the husband's face as she almost screamed with excitement.
Then, with a too-small-for-the-job dolly, we wrestled the big appliance onto the front porch and prepared to slide it into the living room and, then, into the kitchen.
What's one of the worst expressions in "moving big merchandise?" John said it. He said, "Uh, oh!" as it became clear that the appliance was about six inches wider than the door no matter which way we turned turned the big gift.
You know how much a husband can love a wife? John and I saw it. The gift-giving guy took the door off its hinges. When that wasn't enough room, he took the door frame off the doorway. John started to volunteer to take the doors off the gift but the husband got a power saw and loudly cut  enough of the doorway open wide enough to get the refrigerator/freezer combo shoved without a dent through gaping passage and into the kitchen. John grabbed the new appliance's cord to make sure the plug would fit (it did; sometimes they didn't in those days) and the appliance would "turn on" without knocking the power off for the neighborhood. Everything worked magnificently. And there was a merry Christmas in that household -- cold drinks and stored TV dinners would become happily available. Yep, indeed a merry Christmas.  And it probably didn't take that guy a long time to replace the doorway! If he could work a power saw in Arkansas, he could probably work a hammer and nails, too.
#5 ONE MORE CHRISTMAS EVENT NOTE -- WELL MORE THAN ONE NOTE IF YOU COUNT THE MUSIC: This one is a religious and educational note.....As was the yuletide custom at our Highland Park Baptist Church in those days in Texarkana, the "youth" of the church presented a "Christmas cantata" -- a program of church-related and even some not-church related Christmas songs, though, of course, all Christmas songs, it occurs to me, are church-related. Some are more directly related than others. O Holy Night is extremely directly related and that one that goes "Up on the rooftop, reindeer pause..." is a little less directly related. 
When I was in the 9th grade one of our featured songs had a Latin connection. I was a Latin 1 student in public school. One of our choir members, Loretta (if memory serves) was in high school and was a Latin 2 student. She was also an "a" student and I was not. 
This was the era when all the Catholic kids at church and at their school had more exposure to Latin than we Baptist kids got in public school or from a pulpit hammerin' preacher. 

Our choir had a young director who, it turns out, was kind of frustrated by us now and then. 
He nearly quit his holy profession because we were having trouble singing a particular line of a song we'd been rehearsing and rehearsing. 
It wasn't just the voices that frustrated him, it was the pronunciations in a song titled Gloria in Excelsis Deo. Our northeast Texas accents nearly sent the young director over the edge. We'd robustly and nearly music-lessly sang, er, haltingly sing  "Glow reee huh in ex seal cease day hoe." Honestly, the director would wince. 
Finally he asked, "Anybody hear taking Latin in school?" Several hands went up but only one of us, Loretta, was in Latin II and headed toward any kind of academic scholarship. 
The director huddled with Loretta "on the sidelines for a seconds" and when they came back to the director's stand, he announced, "Loretta is going to explain to you poor people how to pronounce this line of the song."
 And Loretta -- she may have become a teacher for all I know --  took the podium and said to us, "Come on y'all, it's pretty easy. Ignore the Latin spelling and just sing like it's breakfast. Gloria in eggshell seas day oh! Now, all of us together Gloria in eggshell seas day oh!" 
One we understood the glory of an eggshell sea, we turned the corner between "halting performance" and "speeding on to yuletide musical glory."  We were able to sing with authority that Christmas Eve "Gloria in Excelsis Deo."
Some church lessons stick with us even if we auditioned for the role of "baby in the manger" or "Joseph" and never got past being told, "With that nose, you'll make a great camel." 
So, on Christmas Eve, don't forget "Gloria in eggshell seas day oh!" and, maybe, say some prayers for peace and understanding on this beloved planet and for its people and their difficult leaders. ... Maybe even for the mystery drone pilots. Could be hijinx-prone elves, you know. 

--- Send your Christmas Eve Adventure Stories to [email protected] and may you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Peaceful New Year. ---