A True Christmas Miracle!

Here we are on the third of Twelve Days of Blogging, and I am thrilled to report that I am not yet out of ideas for twelve straight days of blogging.

Sure, not all of my planned blog ideas are monumental. One of the ideas I have is for a picture of “Merry Christmas” spelled out using toenail clippings. However, mine are not enough. All I can make is “Merry Chris,” and the one Chris I know is somewhat surly. I could settle for “Merry Xmas,” but I don’t want to disappoint you, the reader, by not providing the full, traditional Christmas salutation. I suppose I could use some older ones that I have stored in jars in the basement, but I really wanted them to be fresh clippings from this Christmas season. I guess you can just call me a traditionalist. Now I’m playing a waiting game for someone else in the house to trim their toenails to be able to make that post happen. I know you’ll be waiting on pins and needles.

Wow, this post about a true Christmas miracle really went off the rails quickly. Well, let’s get back on track. After already detailing a recent Hannukkah miracle, I am thrilled to report being witness to a true Christmas miracle involving my wife’s pumpkins (not a euphemism).

After lasting through Halloween, Veteran’s Day, and Thanksgiving, my wife was ready to heartlessly turn her back on our 4 pumpkins that had provided us so much autumnal holiday cheer and unceremoniously kick them to the curb. The Christmas decorations were up, and she didn’t want residual pumpkins (good name for a band) sullying her winter wonderland scene. Normally, I like to roast pumpkin seeds, but since we did not carve the pumpkins for Halloween, I would have had to actually do the work to scoop out the seeds.

Yeah, that seemed beyond my pay grade. But what I knew was my implied job was to take the 4 pumpkins that my wife had set aside and dispose of them. I would normally compost carved pumpkins, which means throwing them somewhere in our backyard. But these pumpkins were full of seeds, and I didn’t want our backyard to become a mass of pumpkin vines in the summer of 2023 and have to do this to reach our shed out back.

Or, perhaps even worse …

And so they sat as November turned into December and we careened toward Christmas. But that’s when the miracling happened. One day as I passed the 4 pumpkins, I noticed they looked a bit different.

4 stems and pumpkin residue (bad name for a band) were all that remained. I considered washing the dirt off the residue and fashioning it into a snappy hairpiece reminiscent of a former president, but even that residue was gone by the next day.

Those who I have regaled with this miraculous tale think it was deer, squirrels, opposums, or racoons that ate the pumpkins. Well, you can believe what you want to believe. You can take the “scientific” approach and believe they were eaten by animals, vaporized by space aliens, or other “logical” explanations. But what about the lack of footprints in the snow, huh? Sure, it hadn’t snowed yet, but I believe if there was snow on the ground, that there wouldn’t have been footprints, because I believe in Christmas miracles.

I also believe it will be a Christmas miracle if anyone buys my award-winning book of short stories either on Amazon or direct from this very website after reading this blog post. Go ahead, click one of those links and make a miracle happen.