Let’s get right to it, shall we?

The Christmas Miracle is not that I woke up today and feel a bit better because there has been a cold kicking my holiday magical patootey ever since Family Christmas, which happened at our house on December 20th.

The Nearly Perfect Husband has been appropriately solicitous (which really translates to ‘carefully solicitous’ as I am a decidedly ‘leave me alone’ sick person and prefer to suffer in silence and my personal space bubble grows proportionally larger with every compiled hour of sickness).  My children – all three and a half of them – are home and are also appropriately solicitous (and careful).

I assumed this was because they also knew me well.  However, I have also deduced that they are not breaking any personal space bubble (or over-solicitousness) rules because they all wanted Santa to come and know I am the one who knows the alarm code and will turn off the motion detectors for him while he places the presents.

So all went well and Santa came and I coughed and wheezed and froggy-talked my way through yesterday and the Christmas Miracle that I was totally expecting – the one that would kick this creeping crud’s ho-ho-ho’ing ARSE, didn’t come.  So I stayed miracle-less-ly sick.

BUT

I have been working on becoming a good receiver of gifts (in addition to loving to give them) and I was totally overachieving on this front yesterday.  But I have to say that I had the help of some very clued in givers and I was blown away by their thoughtfulness for sure.

For instance, I will soon be attaching a new camera strap to the trusty Dingle Snapper (which is really and Olympus OM/D EM-5 but who has time to type all that?) and it is imprinted with the word, ‘wHierd’!

And if that wasn’t enough all around good fun…

An original Apple Computer logo sticker and the exact pin (not a replica or anything!) that the Apple humans were wearing when they were representing the Apple Lisa a long, long time ago (31 years or so, to be more specific).  The Lisa was the first computer with a mouse-driven Graphical User Interface (GUI (pronounced Goo-ey)) and the first Macs took a lot from the Lisa, which was a project that Steve Jobs got kicked off of because he was acting like, you guessed it, an arse… again.  And, yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have now revealed myself to be that nerdy, because I am over the moon excited because I now own an original Lisa lapel-type pin from Santa (via e-bay).

And then, I opened the most wonderful addition to the Dingle Family since Zombie Pig, years ago.

Introducing…

Bumble Pig!

I know.  Look away.  You can probably not handle this much handsomeness in one blog post.

But none of those things were the Christmas Miracle.

The Christmas Miracle had nothing to do with a gift to me.

It was all about a donkey endowment.

Felt Donkey came to me from a special friend, very recently. He had bravely overcome the trauma of being packaged up and driven miles and miles over mountains and rivers and pot-holed New England roadways and arrived in one piece, albeit a bit shaken.

He pulled himself together though, and managed to appear in a single photograph this Christmas season…

You will want to note, here, that Felt Donkey appears to have all his appendages present.

But no extra ones.

So, on Christmas Eve, as we were tidying up for the impending arrival of family (which is really all about me pointing and directing and cherubs and a Nearly Perfect Husband cowering and scurrying around in a desperate attempt at keeping my head from popping off.  And yet we still manage to greet everyone as if we were not, seconds earlier, still trying to rid the house of its resident dust bunnies and dog hair.  Though we are often sweating.)

Anyway.

Sam was helping me in the kitchen and held up what appeared to be a deep grey fuzzy (I can only be so technical in my descriptions). And it looked like a familiar fuzzy but I could not place it. I asked, “What is that?” and Sam replied, “A fuzzy” and then he and I silently agreed (using our eyes) that he should throw it away.

Fast forward.

The family has left and the Nearly Perfect Husband is cleaning up the dishes (that’s the perfect part of ‘Nearly Perfect’) and I am picking up and suddenly…

I find Felt Donkey on the floor… near Marshal’s Place (which is the long footstool thingie that he has to go to when we say “Place!”, which is usually after he has attempted to fool someone into thinking he is an experienced homicidal maniac when they come to the door).

And Felt Donkey looks strange and I realize that he had exactly zero front legs.

Bummer!

But the strange thing is that it looks like he never had front legs… and you can see from the afore-insterted photograph that once he really did have front legs.

And now they are gone.

However… and this is a BIG ‘however’… though he lost an appendage, it seems he also gained an appendage.

Because this blog is rated G most of the time, I’ll just be quiet now and insert a ‘says it all on its own photo:

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

There is also a penis on my Felt Donkey.

I dunno.

Who can explain these things.

Really, we only have two possibilities.

Marshal Dillon Dingle is 2 years old, which is like having a teenaged boy running around the house.

Teenaged boys are all about farts and penises.

If he removed Felt Donkey’s front legs, then perhaps he created the penis.

Or…

It’s a Christmas Miracle for Felt Donkey.

I’ll let you talk among yourselves now.

Thanks for readin’.

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