The Story of the Christmas Bear

**Warning – this blog entry is silly and a little twisted. If you don’t enjoy silly and a little twisted, skip it!**

My mother is a life long knitter.  As far back as I can remember, she would be sitting on the couch with those needles clicking and clacking. And though the yarn would fly, I never thought about where those knitted items went to… until I was in college.

Home on a break, I wandered down to our basement and came across a pile of sweaters, made for no one in particular (according to my mom); a wide variety of sizes and styles and colors. As a college student always on the lookout for cool, odd or eccentric clothes, I was thrilled and several of the sweaters made their way into my closet (neon orange and green sweaters were soon to become infamous on that Iowa campus in the mid 80′s…) I would regularly check the pile every time I came home. And then one year I found this:

I was drawn to it for the colors -red (my favorite) and green – making it an obvious Christmas sweater. The large grizzly bear? I didn’t really pay much attention to that…

…until years later when my then-4-year-old son, Bean-Pole, asked me what the bear had to do with Christmas. Now, being faced with a question that I didn’t know the answer to, I did what all good dads do… I made something up. The story had to be something that would appeal to a little boy raised on the legends of King Arthur, Middle Earth and the land of Narnia with images of battles and dragons and orcs and axes and swords and wizards and magic dancing around in his head… so here, for the first time in print, is the story I told him… the Story of the Christmas Bear.

“Each year on Christmas Eve after all the children of the world have gone to sleep, the Christmas Bear comes around and one by one sniffs each child. If the child has been good, the Christmas Bear simply leaves. But… if the child has been bad… the Christmas Bear rips his throat out!”

Bean-Pole’s response to this heartwarming Holiday story was, and I quote, “Yaaayyyyy!”

Merry Christmas!

Introducing… Watson!

I have two sons… my younger son and I have discovered a shared love of  Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. We have read several of the stories and at Christmas got a Sherlock Holmes computer game. We spent several nights parked in front of the computer and he became my sidekick… so ladies and gentleman, let me introduce… Watson!