Cafeoutdoors.com: Christmas Jokes

Grab the kleenex......

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A Christmas Story

The old man sat in his gas station on a cold Christmas Eve. He hadn't been anywhere in years since his wife had passed away. He had no decorations, no tree, and no lights. It was just another day to him. He didn't hate Christmas, just couldn't find a reason to celebrate. There were no children in his life. His wife had gone.

He was sitting there looking at the snow that had been falling for the last hour and wondering what it was all about when the door opened and a homeless man stepped through. Instead of throwing the man out, George, Old George as he was known by his customers, told the man to come and sit by the space heater and warm-up.

"Thank you, but I don't mean to intrude," said the stranger. "I see you're busy. I'll just go" "Not without something hot in your belly," George turned and opened a wide mouth Thermos and handed it to the stranger. "It ain't much, but it's hot and tasty. Stew. Made it myself. When you're done there's coffee and it's fresh."

Just at that moment he heard the "ding" of the driveway bell. "Excuse me, be right back," George said. There in the driveway was an old 53 Chevy. Steam was rolling out of the front. The driver was panicked. "Mister can you help me!" said the driver with a deep Spanish accent. "My wife is with child and my car is broken." George opened the hood. It was bad. The block looked cracked from the cold; the car was dead. "You ain't going in this thing," George said as he turned away. "But mister. Please help...."The door of the office closed behind George as he went in. George went to the office wall and got the keys to his old truck, and went back outside. He walked around the building and opened the garage, started the truck and drove it around to where the couple was waiting. "Here, you can borrow my truck," he said. "She ain't the best thing you ever looked at, but she runs real good." George helped put the woman in the truck and watched as it sped off into the night.

George turned and walked back inside the office.

"Glad I loaned em the truck. Their tires were shot too. That ol? truck has brand new tires........" George thought he was talking to the stranger, but the man had gone. The thermos was on the desk, empty with a used coffee cup beside it. "Well, at least he got something in his belly," George thought.

George went back outside to see if the old Chevy would start. It cranked slowly, but it started. He pulled it into the garage where the truck had been. He thought he would tinker with it for something to do. Christmas Eve meant no customers. He discovered the block hadn't cracked; it was just the bottom hose on the radiator. "Well, I can fix this," he said to himself. So he put a new one on. "Those tires ain't gonna get 'em through the winter either." He took the snow treads off of his wife's old Lincoln. They were like new and he wasn't going to drive the car.

As he was working he heard a shot being fired. He ran outside and beside a police car an officer lay on the cold ground. Bleeding from the left shoulder, the officer moaned, "Help me." George helped the officer inside as he remembered the training he had received in the Army as a medic. He knew the wound needed attention. "Pressure to stop the bleeding," he thought. The laundry company had been there that morning and had left clean shop towels. He used those and duct tape to bind the wound. "Hey, they say duct tape can fix anythin'," he said, trying to make the policeman feel at ease. "Something for pain," George thought. All he had was the pills he used for his back. "These ought to work." He put some water in a cup and gave the policeman the pills. "You hang in there. I'm going to get you an ambulance." George said, but the phone was dead. "Maybe I can get one of your buddies on that there talk box out in your police car."

He went out only to find that a bullet had gone into the dashboard destroying the two-way radio. He went back in to find the policeman sitting up. "Thanks," said the officer. "You could have left me there. The guy that shot me is still in the area." George sat down beside him. "I would never leave an injured man in the Army and I ain't gonna leave you." George pulled back the bandage to check for bleeding. "Looks worse than what it is. Bullet passed right through 'ya. Good thing it missed the important stuff though. I think with time your gonna be right as rain."

George got up and poured a cup of coffee. "How do you take it?" he asked. "None for me," said the officer. "Oh, yer gonna drink this. Best in the city." Then George added: "Too bad I ain't got no donuts." The officer laughed and winced at the same time. The front door of the office flew open. In burst a young man with a gun.

"Give me all your cash! Do it now!" the young man yelled. His hand was shaking and George could tell that he had never done anything like this before. "That's the guy that shot me!" exclaimed the officer. "Son, why are you doing this?" asked George. "You need to put the cannon away. Somebody else might get hurt." The young man was confused. "Shut up old man, or I'll shoot you, too. Now give me the cash!" The cop was reaching for his gun. "Put that thing away," George said to the cop. "We got one too many in here now." He turned his attention to the young man. "Son, it's Christmas Eve. If you need the money, well then, here. It ain't much but it's all I got. Now put that pee shooter away."

George pulled $150 out of his pocket and handed it to the young man, reaching for the barrel of the gun at the same time. The young man released his grip on the gun, fell to his knees and began to cry. "I'm not very good at this am I? All I wanted was to buy something for my wife and son," he went on. "I've lost my job. My rent is due. My car got repossessed last week." George handed the gun to the cop. "Son, we all get in a bit of squeeze now and then. The road gets hard sometimes, but we make it through the best we can."

He got the young man to his feet, and sat him down on a chair across from the cop. "Sometimes we do stupid things." George handed the young man a cup of coffee. "Being stupid is one of the things that makes us human. Comin' in here with a gun ain't the answer. Now sit there and get warm and we'll sort this thing out." The young man had stopped crying. He looked over to the cop. "Sorry I shot you. It just went off. I'm sorry officer." "Shut up and drink your coffee,? the cop said.

George could hear the sounds of sirens outside. A police car and an ambulance skidded to a halt. Two cops came through the door, guns drawn. "Chuck! You ok?" one of the cops asked the wounded officer. "Not bad for a guy who took a bullet. How did you find me?" "GPS locator in the car. Best thing since sliced bread. Who did this?" the other cop asked as he approached the young man. Chuck answered him, "I don't know. The guy ran off into the dark. Just dropped his gun and ran."

George and the young man both looked puzzled at each other. "Who?s the young fellow?? one of the cops asked. ?I don?t remember him around here before?. Thinking quickly George responded, "Just hired him this morning?. Boy lost his job." The paramedics came in and loaded Chuck onto the stretcher. The young man leaned over the wounded cop and whispered, "Why?" Chuck just said, "Merry Christmas, boy. And you too, George, and thanks for everything."

"Well, looks like you got one doozy of a break there. That ought to solve some of your problems." George went into the back room and came out with a box. He pulled out a ring box. "Here you go. Something for the little woman. I don't think Martha would mind. She said it would come in handy some day." The young man looked inside to see the biggest diamond ring he ever saw. "I can't take this," said the young man. It means something to you." And now it means something to you," replied George. I got my memories. That's all I need." George reached into the box again. A toy airplane, a racing car and a little metal truck appeared next. They were toys that the oil company had left for him to sell. "Here's something for that little man of yours." The young man began to cry again as he handed back the $150 that the old man had handed him earlier. "And what are you supposed to buy Christmas dinner with? You keep that, too. Count it as part of your first week's pay." George said. Now git home to your family." The young man turned with tears streaming down his face. I'll be here in the morning for work, if that job offer is still good." "Nope. I'm closed Christmas day," George said. "See ya the day after." George turned around to find that the stranger had returned.

"Where'd you come from? I thought you left?" "I have been here. I have always been here," said the stranger. "You say you don't celebrate Christmas. Why?" "Well, after my wife passed away I just couldn't see what all the bother was. Puttin' up a tree and all seemed a waste of a good pine tree. Bakin' cookies like I used to with Martha just wasn't the same by myself and besides I was getting a little chubby." The stranger put his hand on George's shoulder. "But you do celebrate the holiday, George. You gave me food and drink and warmed me when I was cold and hungry. The woman with child will bear a son and he will become a great doctor. The policeman you helped will go on to save 19 people from being killed by terrorists. The young man who tried to rob you will become a rich man and share his wealth with many people. That is the spirit of the season and you keep it as good as any man." George was taken aback by all this stranger had said. "And how do you know all this?" asked the old man.

"Trust me, George. I have the inside track on this sort of thing. And when your days are done you will be with Martha again." The stranger moved toward the door. "If you will excuse me, George, I have to go now. I have to go home where there is a big celebration planned."

George watched as the man's old leather jacket and his torn pants turned into a white robe. A golden light began to fill the room.

"You see, George, it's my birthday. Merry Christmas."

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"Being deeply learned and skilled, being well trained and using well spoken words; this is good luck."

The Christmas Hatchet

Patrick F McManus

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 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 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 foot-bridges, chop up a log to feed a campfire, fell poles to pitch a tent on or to hoist up a deer or to make a stretcher to haul out of the woods the person who wasn't that good with his ax.
One of the best things you could say about a man back then was that he was a good woodsman. Being good woodsman seemed to erase a lot of other character flaws.
"Shorty may have some faults," one man might say, "but I'll tell you this-he's a good woodsman!"
"Yep," someone else would observe. "Shorty is a fine woodsman, all right. If he made it to the mountains, I reckon it'll take the posse a month to root him out."
The ax was the primary tool of the woodsman. If he wished, a woodsman could go off into the woods with an ax and provide heat and shelter for himself and live a life of freedom and independence and dignity and not be at anyone's beck and call or have to comb his hair or take baths. Not that I recall anyone ever fleeing to the woods, not even Shorty, who was nabbed sitting on a barstool at Beaky's Tavern, still a long way from the mountains. But it was the idea! If you were good with an ax and a gun, of course, and a knife, you could always fall back to the mountains. What it was all about, underneath, was the potential for freedom, not the jived-up freedom of patriotic speeches but real freedom, one-to-one-ratio freedom, where man plucks his living directly from Nature. Of course, sometimes Nature plucks back, but that's not part of this dream, this vision, as symbolized by the Christmas hatchet.
I first realized I needed a hatchet when I was five years old and my mother read me stories about the pioneers chopping out little clearings in the great forests of the land. Ah, I thought, how satisfying it would be to chop out a clearing, to chop anything, for that matter. My campaign for a hatchet began immediately and achieved fruition on my eighth Christmas. Although I wasn't allowed to touch any of the presents before Christmas Eve, I had spotted one package that bore the general shape of a hatchet. Still, I couldn't be sure, because my mother was a clever and deceptive woman, once wrapping a new pair of longjohns to look like an electric train. Was she pulling a fast one on me this time or had she truly lost her senses and bought me a hatchet?
It turned out to be a hatchet, a little red job with a hefty handle and a cutting edge dull as a licorice stick. Even as I unwrapped it, I could feel all the thousands of little chops throbbing about inside, pleading to be turned loose on the world.
"Now don't chop anything," my mother said.
Within minutes, I had honed a razor edge onto the hatchet and was overcome with a terrible compulsion to chop. Forty-eight hours later, the hatchet was wrenched from my grasp and hidden away, presumably to be returned to me sometime after I had children of my own.
A few days after Christmas I learned that my friend Crazy Eddie Muldoon, who lived on the farm next to ours, had also received a Christmas hatchet.
"Where is it?" I asked. "Let's go chop something."
"Uh, I got it put away," Crazy Eddie said. "Let's use yours."
"Uh, I loaned mine to my cousin for a while," I replied. "He said, 'You don't have a hatchet I can borrow, do you?' and I said, 'Sure."'
"Sure," said Crazy Eddie, who was only crazy part of the time.
As good luck would have it, an epidemic of permissiveness swept the county the following summer and both Eddie and I regained possession of our respective hatchets. There were still plenty of chops left in the hatchets and the two of us wandered off down to our woodlot in search of a suitable recipient.
A large tamarack soared up uselessly on the edge of the woodlot, and Crazy Eddie said maybe it would be a good idea if we built an empty space in the sky where it was standing. As it happened, I had long nourished desire to yell "Timberrrrrr! " at the very moment I sent a mammoth of the forest crashing to the ground.
"Your folks can use it for firewood," Crazy Eddie said, in an attempt to explain his motive for felling the tamarack. But I knew he too yearned to hear the thunder of a great tree dashed to earth; he, as much as I, was into chopping for the pure aesthetics of the thing.
We spent all day chopping away at the tamarack, with Eddie on one side, me on the other, our hatchets sounding like slow but determined woodpeckers. At noon I went home for lunch.
"What are you boys up to?" my mother asked, with no great show of interest.
"Chopping down a big tree."
"That's nice," Mom said. "Don't fight."
After lunch, Crazy Eddie and I were back at the tree again, chipping out a huge U-shaped gouge all the way around its circumference. We were both exhausted, sweating, standing in chips up to our knees, but we could see now it was possible to accomplish the task we had set for ourselves. The tree began to moan and creak ominously as the hatchets bit into its heartwood. By late afternoon the huge tamarack stood precariously balanced on a gnawed core of wood slightly thicker than a hatchet handle.
Neither Crazy Eddie nor I had the slightest clue as to the direction in which the tree might fall, which heightened our anticipation with the added element of suspense. We took turns charging up to the tree, whacking out a quick chip, and then dashing back to relative safety.
Suddenly we heard it: the faint, soft sigh that signaled the tree's unconditional surrender to our Christmas hatchets. A silence fell upon the land. High above us the boughs of the tamarack rustled. Crazy Eddie and I shivered happily. We had accomplished something momentous!
Crrrrrraaa ... went the tree, beginning a slow tilt. We were now able to determine the direction of its fall, which wasn't particularly good. Eddie's father, a short while before, had built a fence between our woodlot and theirs and now, even though I had not yet studied plane geometry, I was able to calculate with considerable accuracy that the tree would neatly intersect the fence at right angles.
"You better yell 'timber,"' Crazy Eddie said, his voice trembling.
"Timmmm . . . " I started to cry. Then we heard another cry. It was that of Eddie's father, who had come down to the woodlot to call him to supper.
"Eddieeeee!" his father called. "Crazy Eddieee! It's time for supperrrrr!"
Cr-r-r-r-a-a-a-a-A-A-A-A-ACK! went the tree.
"Eddieee!" went Eddie's father. "EddieeEEEEEE!"
The monstrous tamarack smote the earth with a thunderous roar, rising above which was the twanging hum of barbwire. Fence posts shot into the air fifty yards away. Eddie's father shot into the air fifty feet away.
"Bleeping bleep of a bleep! screamed Eddie's father, introducing me to that quaint expression for the first time.
There is an old saying that cutting firewood warms you twice: once when you chop it and once when you burn it. Well, chopping down that tamarack warmed Eddie and me three times, and one of those warmings was a good deal hotter than when the wood burned.
I learned a good many things from felling that tamarack with my Christmas hatchet, perhaps the most interesting of which is that a barbwire fence is regarded by its builder as merely a barbwire fence until a tree falls on it. Afterward it is looked back upon as a priceless work of art, surpassed in beauty and grandeur only by the Taj Mahal.
My Christmas hatchet disappeared immediately after the great tree-felling but surfaced again a few years later when I was old enough to conduct my own camping trips. Much to my surprise, I discovered the hatchet was almost useless for cutting wood. It was as if Excalibur had been reduced to a putty knife.
The very next Christmas, I gave my little cousin Delbert the hatchet as a present.
"Wow!" he said. A real hatchet of my own! Thanks a lot!"
"You're welcome!" I shouted after him as he raced away, homing in on a stand of shrubs in his backyard. "But don't chop anything!"

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"Being deeply learned and skilled, being well trained and using well spoken words; this is good luck."