Go For The Gift Baskets, Stay For The Child Abuse

Blogging has been a little lighter than usual over the past few days, largely due to Yankee Wife's dragging me into her involvement with our daughter's PTA and the elementary school's winter festival.

Yankee Wife got snared into being a "PTA liaison." Liaison" is a French word meaning "sucker."

Her responsibility as liaison was to coordinate with the teacher and other parents to create a "wonderful and unique" gift basket to be raffled off the night of the winter festival at the school, which for our purposes will remain nameless to protect the innocent and the soon to be acquitted.

This "wonderful and unique" gift basket raffle was to occur at the end of the night.

Well sports fans, after binging on candy and other sweets awarded as prizes during the first two hours, several hundred elementary-aged children were as twitchy and skittish as a gerbil in Richard Gere's house.

Naturally, the thing to do was herd the glucose-crazed mob of 5-7 year-olds into a cramped cafeteria and ask them to sit quietly with their parents as the assistant principal announced that at 7:30, they would begin the raffle of not one, not two, but forty-four "wonderful and unique" gift baskets.

Thanks to the excellent sadism of Vice Principal Mengele, the first gift basket actually got raffled at around 7:45, at a time when a lot of these kids are normally starting to wind down for the night. Now we had several hundred sleepy, whining sugar-addicts crammed into a small, increasingly warm cafeteria with tired, cranky parents that came straight to the school from a long, hard day of work, most after having to deal with an hour of brutal traffic.

The ambush was about to be sprung.

I don't know exactly when it happened... perhaps around the raffling of the "Pampered Mom" basket, or somewhere there about... but it was like an earthen damn giving way.

A trickle of flopping on the floor was countered with a stern, whispered warning, followed by a cascade of running around and jumping on seats and clenched-teethed "get over here NOWs."

Then, like a pistol shot, somewhere in the vicinity of the "Everything Duke Blue Devils" Basket, the first smack and whimper rang out. The slaughter began in earnest.

Custer, as he fell at the Little Big Horn, pierced by indian arrows, never faced such horrific screams, nor such exquisite carnage. By the time the vice principal read the winning ticket for "Death by Chocolate," it was clear that it had already occurred…

Unclaimed baskets piled up as victims and survivors limped or were dragged through the side exits and off the field of battle where so many had fallen.

As they neared the end of the evening's bloodbath, the Sportsman's Package lay unattended and unguarded. I made my move, and claimed the prize uncontested.

My daughter slumped over in a near-diabetic coma as her mother strapped her into her booster seat as I made room in the trunk for my new fishing tackle.

To the victor goes the spoils.

I can hardly wait until next year.