The Christmas Bomb
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Surely every family has their own unique holiday traditions. Ours, for a brief but memorable era, included the explosion of The Christmas Bomb. My brother, John, was about seventeen when he started this heartwarming tradition that lasted for about five years.

It was a few years after our grandfather died and before the fourth generation baby boom in our family. Every Christmas eve, my father would cook the “vigilia,” a grand seafood feast, and we would celebrate with Uncle John, Auntie Marie and our younger cousins, Michelle, Michael and Jennifer.

The Christmas Bomb was a tradition borne of drunken folly combined with my brother’s remarkable talent for fashioning the explosive masterpiece. He gleaned the intelligence indirectly from his career as a taxidermist. As you may know, most taxidermists like to hunt. And my brother is among a subculture of hunters that like to make their own bullets.

Having a brother that’s a taxidermist certainly made life interesting. I never knew what I might find when I opened the freezer. I fondly remember one spring morning when I was hanging out with John on the porch of our parents’ house. I was having boy problems and sought his advice as he sat on a bed of newspaper and scraped the flesh off the skull of a bear. It occurred to me then that I was not destined for a normal existence.

After the “vigilia,” John would head into his room followed by our mischievously giggling cousins. And they would watch, intrigued, as he constructed The Christmas Bomb.

His technique involved filling a sixteen-ounce plastic soda bottle with gunpowder, sealing it and making a small hole in the cap, through which a fuse would run.

For those not familiar with explosives, sixteen ounces of gunpowder is enough to create a thunderous explosion capable of taking down a small structure and poking out several eyes. Being of the mind that playing with explosives while under the influence of alcohol could make for serious, or perhaps even fatal, injury, I feared The Christmas Bomb terribly. And my role in the whole exercise involved strongly discouraging my brother from going through with the bombing. John would then gaze with compassion at our little cousins’ faces darkening with disappointment at the thought of the holiday explosion being foiled. Then he would deliver a speech about how The Christmas Bomb was a tradition that could not be forsaken. His speech made me feel old.

So we would follow my brother outside where he would carefully place his creation in the middle or our parents’ large front lawn while I waited with our cousins by the side of the house. We would watch with rapt attention as he lit the fuse and ran for his life.

It looked like a scene from a war movie; his silhouette running towards us as a magnificent burst of orange flame exploded with a thunderous clap that would inevitably cause concerned faces to appear in the windows of every house within our range of vision.

That was always my favorite part of The Christmas Bomb. For some reason I found the concerned faces in the windows terribly amusing. My brother and cousins would laugh gleefully. Grateful that we had survived another holiday explosion unscathed, I would join the others as they made their way to the smoldering site to admire the manhole cover-sized crater in the center of the lawn. Then we would return inside for coffee and dessert.

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