The Calabrese Secret Decoder Ring.

As the holidays are slowly approaching, I find myself spending more time with my parents or around their house. With a busy schedule, its not always easy to meet their demands of attendance at family functions or just regular everyday.

So, I really think that my family is super funny, and if you saw the day to day, you would probably laugh too. This past weekend, I helped my father put up the Christmas lights on the house. Now, mind you this is a huge endeavor every year. My brothers and sister have long resigned their duty to putting up and helping my parents put up the lights because they realize its a task that requires extreme patience and.. ok..forget that..I'm doing it because I'm the youngest and I guess I'm paying my dues last. There you have it.

Its the order of age that dictates who gets stuck with helping my parents on certain things. Anyway, so we begin putting up the lights, and no matter what year, my father always puts up a fight with me on how to put up the lights. I tell him, "Papa-- don't put the big lights with the little lights..it has to match.." Do you think he listens,? No. Here I am disconnecting lights right after he decides to mess up the symmetry of the lights. He has no regard for design, his ideology is, "what's-a -da-diff-a-rence?" I try to tell him, yes there is a difference.

So, the comedy to this is, I'm stringing lights and he's messing up the lights on the next set of bushes. The neighbors heard us yelling back and forth in Italian and English. Then, here comes my mother sticking her head out of the door, to tell me not to put lights on a certain tree because she doesn't like it. Well, Mom,...guess what?...that tree has lights on it already. "Oh...no...va bene.no ci fa niente..) Really, as she's standing there with the infamous puss on her face, so here I go, Margaret disconnects the friggen tree so she's happy. The irony is at the end of the stringing, I test all the lights and my mother and father are both standing there. So, the tree that my mother specifically says not to string, is not lit. She says, " Ma perche, non du-ma.?"( this is phonetic dialect--not a real word.) Um.."ma, did you not tell me to disconnect the lights off this tree?" She says, "Yeah, ma se como tu i min-tiste gia, i potive ra-sarre." (again this is all phonetically spelled, so you can understand.)

I just looked at her and said, "you must be joking! You guys are incredible..!!! I need a secret decoder ring just to figure out what you guys really mean or want!!!!!" There you have it, the eloquent masterpiece of a moment in putting up the Christmas lights at my parent's house. It just doesn't get any better than that. Oh and don't think my brothers and sister weren't laughing when I told them. I'll have to mastermind a task for them to do next, so they can get the full effect of Fran and Joe. Tweet