Never Sniff a Gift Fish by Patrick F. McManus
Author:Patrick F. McManus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2012-01-10T00:00:00+00:00
The Christmas Hatchet
The best evidence Iâve been able to come up with that the human race is increasing in intelligence is that parents no longer give their kids hatchets for Christmas.
When I was a boy the hatchet was a Christmas gift commonly bestowed upon male children. In an attempt to cover up their lapse of sanity, parents would tell their offspring, âNow donât chop anything.â
By the time this warning was out of the parentsâ mouths, the kid would have already whacked two branches off the Christmas tree and be adding a second set of notches to one of his new Lincoln logs.
It was not that the kid harbored a gene compelling him to be destructive. The problem was with the hatchet, which had a will of its own. As soon as the kid activated it by grasping the handle, the hatchet took charge of his mental processes and pretty much ran the whole show from then on.
Shortly after Christmas the kid would be making frequent trips to the woodshed with his father, and not to chop wood either.
âThe hatchet did it!â the kid would yell as he was being dragged toward the woodshed by his shirt collar. âI was just walking through the gate and my hatchet leaped out and chopped the post!â
Some kids were gullible enough to try the old George Washington cherry tree ploy. âI did it with my own little hatchet,â they would confess.
âI know,â their father would say. âNow haul your rear end out to the woodshed!â
The moral most of my friends and I drew from the cherry tree story wasnât that George Washington was so honest but that his father was a bit slow. This showed that even a kid with a dumb father could grow up to be President.
The average length of time a kid was allowed to remain in possession of his hatchet was forty-eight hours. By then the hatchet would have produced approximately sixty bushels of wood chips, eight hundred hack marks, and a bad case of hysteria for the kidâs mother. The youngster would be unceremoniously stripped of his hatchet, even as its blade fell hungrily on a clothesline post or utility pole, and be told that he could have it back when he was âolder,â by which was meant age twenty-seven.
Kids now probably wouldnât understand the appeal hatchets held for youngsters of my generation. If a kid today received a hatchet for Christmas, he would ask, âWhere do you put the batteries?â He would have no inkling of the romance of the hatchet and what it symbolized to boys of an earlier time, presumably all the way back to George Washington.
In the time and place of my childhood, woodcraft still loomed large in the scheme of a manâs life. A man sawed and split firewood for the home, of course, but more important, he could take care of himself in the woods. He could build log cabins and lean-tos and footbridges, chop up a log to feed a campfire, fell
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Coloring Books for Grown-Ups | Humor |
Movies | Performing Arts |
Pop Culture | Puzzles & Games |
Radio | Sheet Music & Scores |
Television | Trivia & Fun Facts |
Spell It Out by David Crystal(35818)
Professional Troublemaker by Luvvie Ajayi Jones(29401)
We're Going to Need More Wine by Gabrielle Union(18598)
The Secret History by Donna Tartt(18070)
Cat's cradle by Kurt Vonnegut(14705)
The Goal (Off-Campus #4) by Elle Kennedy(13174)
The Social Justice Warrior Handbook by Lisa De Pasquale(11938)
The Break by Marian Keyes(9062)
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan(8858)
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher(8411)
The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro(8347)
Educated by Tara Westover(7650)
The handmaid's tale by Margaret Atwood(7414)
Win Bigly by Scott Adams(6796)
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin(6760)
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz(6407)
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion(5800)
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty(5789)
The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish(5393)
