An Aunt Story

This is a story about an Aunt and her sweatshirt. Really, it's a story about the Christmas of 1981 in Ohio. My parents and I cooked up a scheme to give everyone red sweatshirts with a word on it - ironed on in green letters. Only when everyone was wearing their sweatshirts and assembled in the proper order would the words make some sort of sense. Only we didn't give them any clues. The idea was to see how long it would take for everyone to figure it out.

There were twelve sweatshirts. I remember my grandmother was "A Mare," Grandpa was "Moose," and Aunt Lea was "Men." My youngest cousin was "Wee Fish" and the newest member of the family was an aunt who had recently married into the C Dot clan. She was the first to unwrap a sweatshirt and hers read "Ant." Cute, she must have thought, like getting a garish Christmas sweater in a roomful of newly acquired in-laws. She smiled, and thanked us anyway and probably thought we were all a little off our rockers.

The gift exchange continued and then someone else opened another sweatshirt. And then another. Finally, someone (and I suspect this is another aunt) guessed that we were up to something, that this was some sort of riddle. Oh, we thought we were so clever to devise such a game. Everyone put on their sweatshirts and went into a huddle and, sure enough, they figured it out. Clever people, these C Dots.

There's a picture of everyone wearing their sweatshirts. Assembled in order, they read:

Wee Fish - Ewe - A Mare - Egrets - Moose - Panda - Hippo - Gnu - Deer (to which we added, since we need three more sweatshirts) Ant - Men - Emu

I'll have to find that picture. I owe someone for posting a picture about Floss Dancing but that's a different story entirely.