Bob Ringwood - A Christmas Memory

Ringwood Christmas Memories

Bats and Bulbs BY Beavis and Butt Head … Along with Bears, Beets and Battle Star Galactica

The year escapes me but the present doesn’t. Tom is working for Red Star and scores Louisville slugger bats for brothers Peter and Bob with our names engraved in the barrel.

The scene is the living room. I can’t recall if siblings #9 and #10 had graduated from the tree in the front hallway under the stair case to the living room, but we were clearly in the living room because there was a fire in the fireplace.

Before you had Beavis and Butt Head, you had Pete and Bob. These two idiots were the ones who competed to see who could stand closest to the fireplace for the longest time. The best was when you were wearing jeans and they got so hot from the flames, you had to walk completely stiff away from the fireplace, lest the heat work its way up your leg. More was to come.

The things that stand out in a youths memory of this magical time, the Christmas eve mass that lasted an eternity, the angels that stood outside the front porch on Owasco Street as decorations (whose heads would later serve as dueling swords), the silver tinsel that was such a pain to place on the tree and the popcorn strings that never quite made it there.

And those light bulbs on the tree, they were huge! The kind that you had to screw into the cord, they came in all kinds of colors: red, blue, green, white, orange. Who knew that later on they would serve as batting practice?

Mom and Dad had a silver box that was left on one of the tables in the living room cornered up to one of the couches. This was probably a gift that Dad got playing in a golf tournament. I wasn’t quite certain if it served as a place to store smokes, because if was perfectly suited for that or you could place all kinds of trinkets in them.

After the excitement of a Christmas morning had settled down and everyone ventured to other parts of the house, Pete and Bob were left in the living room to mind for themselves.

Being that it was December and the upcoming baseball season was many months ahead, Pete and Bob thought it was critical that they be prepared for the upcoming spring training season. With bats in hands, we were half way home….and all we needed was…. wait, wasn’t there something in that shiny silvery smoke box that would suffice? And their it was …a big old blue Christmas light bulb that was not working. Surely, this would serve as a sufficient substitute.

I don’t recall who first pitched or who first batted but I sure do remember the sound and feeling when a glass Christmas light bulb met wood. It was as if a little window had shattered into million pieces that landed everywhere and probably wreaked havoc on the vacuum. Oh, the joy of destruction and mayhem, bits of Christmas bulb glass here and there. Now, we had to find more non-working light bulbs that would serve as batting practice. Out of broken bulbs, let’s use the working ones, I mean Christmas is done and over with and the tree is going to be out by the road on January 1 anyways, as it always was.

In hindsight, things could have been worse, windows or limbs broken at the expense of our new Louisville Sluggers. Nope…. Beavis and Butthead were practical and mature by only breaking every possible Christmas bulb they could get their hands on.

How I wish I had that bat today!

-Bob Ringwood, December 2020