This year, my family hung all of our stockings in front of the fireplace in preparation for Christmas morning. My mother was in the kitchen, preparing a delicious antipasti platter that has become a Christmas Eve tradition in our house in recent years.
My parent's house is always very, very cold. My grandfather used to snidely call it Siberia. It may be a combination of both my father's economical mentality or my mother's hot-blooded tendency to have a high body temperature. "You think it's cold? You must be crazy! I'm roasting and boasting in here!" she always says with a grin.
So naturally, having been taught to always speak up for ourselves, my siblings and I are usually complaining about how cold we are. This leads to short-lived arguments fairly regularly, ones that we lovingly refer to as "routine".
My parents tell me that I am just cold because I live in an apartment where they are using industrial powered heaters, and my body temperature has adjusted to the higher temperature. The funniest thing about that interaction, of course, is that my building unit does not have central heating. I have electric baseboard heaters in every room in my apartment (the kitchen, the bedroom, and the basement) with individual controls, and I can assure you that my heating costs for my 500sq ft. duplex in Brooklyn is higher than their suburban Central Jersey house with the double garage.
As many times as I will tell them this, and even complain about my ridiculously high electric bill, they will still give me that same humorous explanation for my coldness.
So back to Christmas Eve. As I said, my mother was preparing the meal in the kitchen. And we were complaining about the cold. So my father decided to give in -- he wouldn't raise the heat, BUT he would make a fire in the fireplace. This was the best upgrade we would get, so we happily decided to take him up on his offer.
My father loves to mess around with things, anything that gives him a practical reason to fidget brings a smile to his face. So he loves to build a fire and tend to it. And he also loves to be appreciated for doing it. When he builds a fire, he will repeatedly look over to you and say "Some fire, huh?" in his best Bronx accent. And he gets such a kick out of the whole procedure that you can't help but repeat it back to him. "That is some fiah."
So my father started to build the fire. My mother likes to check in on him every now and again to see what he's doing, both because of her maternal oversight nature and his tendency to sometimes be a bit short-sighted in his domestic endeavors. And this time was no exception. As is often the case, she spotted something about the scene that was a little off. The stockings were still hanging above the fire.
At that moment, a "routine" argument erupted. She criticized him for leaving the stockings up so close to where the fire would be. He insisted that there was plenty of distance between the stockings and the fireplace, his frustration exacerbated by years of perceived nagging. She was angry that he never paid attention to her opinion, when she certainly knew what she was talking about. "Why take the risk? Mark my words! Those stockings are going to catch on fire if you leave them up there!"
And then he said "Would you leave me alone? Those socks are not going to melt! Scram, you bother me!" After about two minutes of verbal grappling, the stockings were taken down by my mother herself, with much fanfare of course.
"Melting socks!" I said to my sister. That sounds like a blog name. "Melting Socks dot Blog Spot dot Com".
