Sybil Bruncheon’s “Christmas Capers!”…

Karen was one of those nice single ladies with no family so she always made Christmas dinner for her friends, neighbors, and coworkers who didn't have any place to go! She called them all her "Holiday Orphans", and they appreciated her so! ... then one year, she decided that it might be more fun to serve an all-liquid menu. An assortment of broths, consommés, gravies, and the booze that would compliment each course.... unfortunately, when the guests arrived at 1 in the afternoon, they found her unconscious under the dining table in nothing more than a pair of turkey-feather pasties, lipstick way outside her lip line, and a souvenir apron from Provincetown with a map of Cape Cod pointing suggestively to her ...um... "lady place"...

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Sybil Bruncheon's My Merry Memoirs!... Dagmar's "doll"...

Darlings, I've told you about my twin sister many times and in stories that you either have asked me to dig up or stories which you like me to tell and retell again... (much like terrifying ghost stories around a roaring campfire during a girl scout jamboree... with S'mores... and calamine lotion!)

Anyway, I don't think I've ever told you the story of Dagmar and her special doll... and "The Nearly Lost Weekend". You see, Dagmar and I are (and always were!) identical, and I mean IDENTICAL twins! No one, not even our parents could ever tell us apart... well, unless Dagmar had pulled a gun out of her purse or started a fire in someone's dining room, starting a five years of age. I would find a stray kitten and be devoted to it... Dagmar might start researching recipes to serve it "en brochette". Thankfully, our family's staff of gardeners, butlers, maids, etc. managed to keep her from any serious mischief, (although old Mrs. O'Reilly next door DID disappear during our Halloween party when we were 8... and she was never found again. A piñata bearing a striking resemblance to her was reported at the Masonic Lodge's costume ball a couple of miles away... oh well. Another story for another time...)

At one Christmas when we were still quite young, Dagmar had managed to drug my eggnog claiming she was just sprinkling some nutmeg in it. I really should have known better, especially because her "nutmeg" was in tablet-form and out of a clearly marked prescription bottle! But I was still very open-minded, open-hearted, and credulous, even for a child! It turned out that Dagmar dragged me, unconscious, gagged, and handcuffed into a remote corner gable of our cavernous and maze-like attic! There, buried in stacks of crates, Vaudeville trunks, dress-forms, and clippings and posters of questionable hootchy-kootch acts, I languished while she rampaged through our family's Christmas celebrations, completely undetected! She had secretly commissioned a life-size doll from a Bulgarian puppet-maker... or was it Hungarian??... Akron?... whatever. It arrived by post, and she spirited it away to her room, dressed it in one of our matching pinafores, and then proceeded to walk it around the entire estate, conversing elaborately with it, and keeping it just out of eye-shot enough for no one to notice that it, in fact, was NOT me! 

Imagine! Decorating the house, Christmas Eve dinner with family and friends, off to bed before Santa's arrival, and then... CHRISTMAS MORNING! There was Dagmar dragging that damn doll dressed in a matching nightgown downstairs with our entire family... handing out gayly and gloriously wrapped presents! Opening them! OOOHING AND AHHHING at each lovely gift... and Dagmar using her infernal talent for ventriloquism to make the doll sound like me in complete conversations about the whole Holiday weekend! Apparently, my "gifts" to the family (courtesy of Dagmar's diabolical sense of humor!) included crayon-drawn "gift-certificates" to my Mother (building a gazebo out of field stones for her herb garden), to my Father (fetching, cleaning, and dressing any game birds that he and his pals had shot in the next 3 months!), to my Aunt Deirdre (canasta and rapt listening to her endless stories of nursing during the earlier Influenza epidemic of 1889 during which she fell in love with about 87 doughboys!), etc., etc., etc. for everyone else in the family! Given Dagmar’s natural instinct for practical jokes… and malice, you can imagine the “gifts” that I was responsible for by that evening. Thank goodness for completely disoriented and dotty Aunt Deirdre (yes! THAT same Aunt Deirdre!) who wandered away from the family festivities, blundering about unsupervised until she finally got to my remote part of the labyrinthine attic dressed in her old Florence Nightingale nurse’s uniform. Carrying her old railroad kerosene lamp, she literally stumbled over me, sure that I was a prisoner of war of the Kaiser’s German army that she needed to rescue! Despite her impaired perceptions and abilities, she still nimbly picked the locks on my handcuffs with a bobby pin plucked from her nurse’s wimple. But before she would release me, she insisted on checking me thoroughly for signs of abuse, torture, malnutrition, and lice. When I finally got back downstairs and confronted everyone, I wasn’t sure what I was more infuriated by; Dagmar’s villainy, or my family’s not noticing the difference between me and some doll… or possibly Aunt Deirdre’s highly invasive checking for lice! Whatever. This photo is of Dagmar and her doll… By the way, that’s Dagmar on the left!!!!!

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From Sybil Bruncheon's "My Merry Memoirs"... and the not so merry...

I was stunned when I first went to Hawaii many, many years ago and saw poinsettias towering over the adorable bungalows there… as trees!! It broke my heart to realize that all the beautiful poinsettias people on the mainland were giving each other at Christmas (and killing by not watering them or depriving them of sunlight, etc.) were actually trees that had been thoughtlessly kidnapped from their native-homes for nonsense. NONSENSE!

Wrapped in hideous aluminum foil, tossed into corners of over-heated dentists' offices, knocked over by toppling stacks of Highlights and Jack & Jill magazines, and finally thrown leggy and wilted onto frigid January sidewalks to be carted off with bewildered and abandoned Christmas trees... Even as a child, I found the Holiday season filled with an encroaching melancholy in any corner of the festivities, ready to creep out from under a stack of gaily wrapped gifts or a brightly lit and ornamented garland to tug at one's hem and break your heart.

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Sybil Bruncheon A La Maison - Onto the battlefield... (1986)

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From Sybil Bruncheon's "My Merry Memoirs"... un petit déjeuner sur le Titanic!

I was THERE!... with my uncle Sir Cedric Dumby-Phyfe. He wrote a letter back home and described this very menu! Here's some of it:

... and the entire First Class was in an uproar over the "hodge podge"... a sort of mousse/pâté en terrine made out of hedge hogs, garden moles, shrews, and the occasional squirrel that may have wandered under the wheels of a local greengrocer's truck and been tossed into a chopper. Then there was the "potted shrimps" and "soused herrings"; fish that had literally been drowned to death in brandies, whiskies... or whatever booze that a drunken chef had lying around... some diners claimed he may even have used cheap French cologne! I certainly wouldn’t have been surprised given his unintelligible accent! The "consommé jardiniere" was accurately named; literally "consume planter" or soup from a garden... meaning that any leaves, twigs, soil, and even bugs might be in it! Other items on the menu such as "brawn", "sardines", "kidney", "surrey capon", "jacket potatoes", "mutton", "corned ox tongue", and "fillets of plaice" were equally unappetizing... or at the very least confusing. And "lettuce" and "tomatoes" was so generic… completely un-fascinating! And "Manhattan apples"!... what?! Bought from some pushcart down on Rivington Street or in a Little Italy alleyway? That's what we paid all that money for, for a First Class passage on the Titanic?... ridiculous!

To be honest, it was almost a relief to strike an ice berg and be delivered from four more days of such rubbish! We were so lucky to have been rescued by the RMS Carpathia... where the cuisine wasn't nearly as aspirational, but where "cream of tomato soup" and something called a grilled cheese sandwich were perfectly understandable and quite cozy, thank you. I shall speak to Cook when we return to the estate! Love to all and especially to the livestock! Ceddie!...

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Tour-ette during the big Nor'easter on 12/16/2020. (part 2)

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Tour-ette during the big Nor'easter on 12/16/2020. (part 1)

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Sybil Bruncheon's "Christmas Kitties Chaos in the Crèche!"... #10:

Spencer was always the jokester... with just a touch of malice, he loved making other kitties on the block laugh and laugh! Like the time he hid in the stupid stick-house the humans had set up in his front yard. He always managed to sneak up on folks and scare the crap out of them! One night, he decided to purr really loudly and make the parent-statues think their baby's motor was running. LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!

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Sybil Bruncheon's "Christmas Kitties Chaos in the Crèche!"... #9:

Lumpy Throckmorten was fat... no, really! REALLY FAT. He preferred synonyms, like "ample", "robust", "successful", "prosperous", and from lady friends and humans (again, of the female gender) "cuddly", "scrumptious", and "quite a handful", whatever the Hell THAT meant! At any rate, he was a demanding diner in his household and kept his human staff on their toes not only for the quantity of food that was required but also for the luxurious selection and variety of delicacies to keep him from his "hangry" rampages against fine collectibles, cashmere sweaters, state-of-the-art electronics, and expensive shoes (where he might hide a newly voided "surprise" during the night!) Sadly, Lumpy's weight continued to climb and climb, and on last Christmas, it finally hit 48 lbs. In addition to some angina and being frequently out of breath, even while napping and dreaming about Canadian bacon blintzes, he could barely groom himself without the help of his humans and their skill with special brushes and a blow-dryer.

It all came to a head on January 6th, when Lumpy ate an entire fruit cake with no regard for the fact that, like most human fruit cake, it had been re-gifted from one relative to another for several years. In addition to that, Lumpy had chewed and eaten both Caspar and Melchior upon their arrival at the blesséd stable and was about to start on Balthazar and the Holy Infant himself... in front of his horrified parents and various shepherds, candlemakers, tent-makers... whatever... Lumpy was rushed to the vet and into a private room in the Gentle-Touch Four-Legged 'Firmary where his stomach was pumped, his colon was cleansed, and where, later in the week, he was given a gastric bypass. His picture and story were in all the Veterinary Journals around New England... and in the centerfold of Highlights Magazine. You might have seen him at your dentist's office while you were in the waiting room!...

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Sybil Bruncheon's "Christmas Kitties Chaos in the Crèche!"... #8:

Meyer Sulkerston was no different than any other house cat in Fibber Falls, Iowa. During most of the year, Meyer and his pals around the neighborhood were fussed over by their individual human staffs... and the performances of their requisite duties were compared and either praised or panned by the feline members of the exclusive la Boîte RonRonner! Cigars of fine catnip, expensive vintage brandies, imported sardines, and filthy jokes about pussy were the order of the day and night at their soirées. But at Holiday time, all of the cats gave their human servants a rest for the few weeks before and during something called Christmas. Instead of having to sit quietly and attentively and admire the cat-of-the-house for hours on end, the humans were permitted to set up small dioramas of worshipful human statues in various exotic but ultimately unimportant tableaux. Their odd costumes, poses, and even their props and the figures of other species were completely secondary to the devoted expressions on their faces! Of course, there was still the problem of the statues neither petting nor feeding their employers, but this certainly was a start; they didn't get restless, wander about making stupid conversation, or step on one's paws. And, after all, the real humans would begin their full-time duties again and with added vigor some time in the first week or so of January when the statue-humans were wrapped up in old newspapers and thrown into a cardboard box in the attic which also made a nice kitty-bed when one chose...

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