Never Sniff a Gift Fish by Patrick F. McManus

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 I’ve 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, “Now don’t chop anything.”

By the time this warning was out of the parents’ 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.

“The hatchet did it!” the kid would yell as he was being dragged toward the woodshed by his shirt collar. “I was just walking through the gate and my hatchet leaped out and chopped the post!”

Some kids were gullible enough to try the old George Washington cherry tree ploy. “I did it with my own little hatchet,” they would confess.

“I know,” their father would say. “Now haul your rear end out to the woodshed!”

The moral most of my friends and I drew from the cherry tree story wasn’t 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 kid’s 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 “older,” by which was meant age twenty-seven.

Kids now probably wouldn’t understand the appeal hatchets held for youngsters of my generation. If a kid today received a hatchet for Christmas, he would ask, “Where do you put the batteries?” 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 man’s 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



Copyright Disclaimer:
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.