Thanksgiving Blog 2: I Got Mugged By My Family!

Thanksgiving Blog 2: I Got Mugged By My Family!

For the last 24 years, my aunt Eva and my grandpa, known to us as Pop-Pop, come up from Florida for thanksgiving. This year she brought someone else with her- her fiancé Zach. Zach is a welcome addition to the family and to this thanksgiving tradition.

We have so many awesome traditions throughout the holidays, the creepy Halloween decorations, the family gatherings for thanksgiving, the cookie making at Christmas. But there’s one thing that I hope never becomes a tradition in my household- the toilet challenge.

To understand the toilet challenge you must first understand my brother Luke. You know that kid in your middle school/high school class who had absolutely no sense of shame? The class clown who is willing to do literally anything (no matter how stupid it sounds) just to laugh and make other people laugh… that’s Luke. He comes up with these ideas that are really dumb, but because of the way he executes them they’re hilarious.

The most recent example of this is the toilet challenge. Luke’s Idea was to have two people sit on two separate toilets (fully clothed) for as long as they could-no phones, no magazines, no human interaction. The first person to get up loses.

Mom’s immediate family lives in central Ohio, so they (or most of them always) come to our house for Thanksgiving. While this side of the family is much bigger than depicted here, the important characters of this story are as follows: My aunt Melissa and uncle Andy,  their four kids, Alex, Macy, Nicholas, and Ellie, and my aunt Cyndi.

Somehow, the kids managed to raise $53 from the adults, I'll never understand how they pulled that off. The winner of the toilet challenge wins the money. It took about an hour of preparation for the toilet challenge itself (figuring out rules, who is competing, etc…), and during that time the $53 mysteriously went missing!

As soon as they discovered the money was missing, the kids went crazy and started their interrogations... Not going to lie, I was kind of being a jerk and egging them on. Once it came time for my interrogation, Maci began with the questions and I said, “I don't have the money”, t which point I winked at her. She quickly alerted the others and things just went downhill from there. I saw Nicholas, Luke, and Josh charging me. “Oh no!” I exclaimed as they tackled me. They pulled my wallet out and realized I actually didn't have the money. People were now very confused and they had no idea what happened to the money.

Now, as all this was going on aunt Cyndi, aunt Melissa, and mom had decided to start a spontaneous karaoke session. The first song they sang was “I Want to Be Rich”, by Calloway. For those of you who don't know (I had never heard this song before the incident), the chorus goes like this: I want money, lots and lots of money, I want the pie in the sky. I want money, lots and lots of money, so don’t go asking me why. I wanna be rich…”. As soon as that part of the song started Cyndi started “Making it rain” with the missing $53! and everyone went crazy. 

While that whole situation is completely ridiculous…isn't that what Thanksgiving is about? Embracing the weirdest of your family, and being happy that you are all together. And while its good that we have a day to celebrate that, I think it's something that people forget about throughout the rest of the year. So throughout this next year try to keep that thanksgiving spirit with you.

Hope you had a greattastic Thanksgiving!

J. Mitchie Ulibarri