Best/worst Christmas stories

Beliefnet's community page is collecting best-and-worst Christmas stories. Go thou there to share your own, but if you do, be sure to leave them also in the comboxes below.

My "best" Christmas story I told in Touchstone a few years ago. It involved listening to the Roches sing an a cappella Christmas concert not far from Ground Zero in NYC, in the snow. Touchstone's server is down as I type this, so I'll try to link to it later. Yet I don't have any "...and that was the bestest Christmas ever!" stories, only ordinary good memories. Like: when I was little, we used to go to my Uncle Murphy and Aunt Patsy's house for a Christmas Eve party every year. It was not especially kid-friendly -- except for Tee-Jules D'Hemecourt doing a live reading of his famous (in south Louisiana) "Cajun Night Before Christmas" in front of the fireplace, for us kids -- but I loved it all the same. They had a cathedral ceiling, and Aunt Pat always put up the biggest Christmas tree I'd ever seen -- and decorated it gorgeously. I loved being near that tree, and I loved the smell of gumbo from the kitchen, and the tinkle of ice in bourbon glasses, and the adults talking. It was so festive. Murphy and Patsy lived down the road from us, but they had friends from Baton Rouge (like Tee-Jules) and elsewhere (like Capt. Bubba, a Washington lobbyist who came one year wearing a cape and hood he'd made, festooned with bottle caps; he later got lit, put it on and drove his motorcycle into the city to scare people). To a country kid like me, this made them seem glamorous and sophisticated in ways we just weren't. I liked that. Their parties always seemed so alive.

I can't think of any "worst" stories. I don't remember it because I was too small, but I'm told that at one year's Christmas party Uncle Murphy got liquored up, went outside and fired his shotgun twice into the air. He came inside and announced that he'd just shot Santa Claus out of the sky. I bawled my widdle head off. I don't know how my dad kept himself from knocking his brother out cold. Heroic self-restraint, I guess.

I do remember the Christmas morning when I was nine or 10, and I ate half a bag of Hershey's kisses ... about an hour before a vicious stomach virus going through the neighborhood hit me. All that chocolate came spewing out my nose. Yuck, I know. But nothing remotely as interesting as Robert Earl Keene's magnificent "Merry Christmas from the Family."