December 13, 2017
“Holidazed”
by Marci White
For this special holiday show, our MC Brad Smith wished everyone a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah and joyous Kwanzaa. Brad’s warm and welcoming spirit added a great energy to the show.
Rebecca McCarthy told about her engineer father and how he was “good at many things” but not gift-giving. After he gave his wife a green plastic trashcan for Christmas, something had to change.
Donna Fee Smith grew up in rural Oconee County in the 1970s. The only thing she knew about religion was from seeing Billy Graham on her grandma’s TV. Even after college she didn’t know much, but a Jewish boyfriend she met after college opened her eyes to the unexpected joys of multiculturalism.
Bert Parks owned and managed a trailer park in downtown Atlanta in the 1980s and ’90s, a challenging period that included difficult characters and some dangerous encounters. In this story he tells about a longtime tenant, a woman who suffered fits of paranoia and slept with a pistol. She decided to finally move her trailer one Christmas day to a “better” trailer park, but that wasn’t the end of dealing with one of his most irascible residents.
Emily Parker told a funny and self-deprecating story about being an overly confident college student traveling abroad in Germany. She soon met her comeuppance.
Raquel Durden was chosen to be the Crackerjack storyteller for the night. During her 25 years in the military, she spent Christmases all over the world and was the recipient of much-appreciated Christmas care packages – some more cherished than others.
Hannah Angel was devastated when her boyfriend dumped her abruptly during the holidays. That Christmas could hardly have been more terrible. And then her cat went missing.
Paul Guillebeau grew up in northwest Georgia, the third of four boys. Every Christmas the three oldest boys would take their grandmother’s Jeep and head off to the woods seeking the biggest Christmas tree they could possibly fit into their house. One year there was a Christmas tree disaster and a small miracle.
As a stubborn 18-year-old, Terry Kaley married a man 24 and 1/2 years older than she was. On their first Christmas together she discovered that he was too thrifty to spend the money on a tree. But a friend owned some woods and told them they could hike into the woods and cut down a tree for free. That sounded good to him, but their quest led to a difficult situation they found hard to extract themselves from. Christmas was never the same again.
Rabbit Box 