[Lou]

I'd love to hear everyone's favorite Christmas memories. One of my favorites was the year my father put an awkwardly wrapped gift under the tree and told me to be very very careful not to break it. I picked it up and I could tell it was something with poster board wrapped around it, but he gruffly told me that some things break very easily when handled too much. Every time I picked it up after that he cautioned me not to break it. "If you break it I won't buy another one!" he would say. That would always make me put it right back down again. I was scared to death I had broken it one time because I heard it rattle. I was so curious about that gift that year it drove me crazy. The only thing I could imagine it could be was a beautiful china doll. I couldn't wait to see it. One of the rules in our house was that we did not tell lies to keep someone from guessing what a gift was so if my Dad said I could break it I imagined that it had to be extremely fragile. Well, you can imagine my shock when I opened it first thing on Christmas morning and discovered it was a skate board! My Dad knew I would guess it in a minute if I felt around and messed with it too much. And he never lied about it! Not once did he say it was fragile or that it would break. He only said that it could break. He got me!