S2 E3 - We Celebrated Everything… Prematurely and Dramatically

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Judy, we were up and mine up for the reunion. We've talked to people. Season one is in the books. Working on season two. A couple of episodes are out. But we've had people up at the reunion and recently here in Denver, just because they follow us. But have you guys ever had anything weird going on with Christmas, the holidays, or birthdays that you guys can talk about? I see you shaking your head because the answer to that is, oh my, do we ever?

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Nothing was, I'm gonna say, totally normal, but one of the first memories that I have of Christmas is one, we celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve, which was a little bit different than a lot of people. It was the long wait in the day for it to get to about 3 30. We always had to wait for our dad to get home from work, of course. And we had already eaten, we were all ready, and then he would have his nice Christmas Eve dinner, and he'd have three kids staring him down.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

One of my earliest memories of Christmas was up on North Hill. I remember, barely remember because I was little that I had opened up, I got up, I thought it was Christmas, and I thought it was Christmas just for Donnie because by the way, I think you still think it's always Christmas for Donnie. Judy, I opened up every present under the tree. All mine, all yours. Everybody, if there was a present under the tree, I opened it up. So Christmas started with Donnie getting a spanking.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

By the way, wasn't that the year you were a nose biter too? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

I bit a nose one time, dad bit my nose back, and then I was never a nose biter again. So I don't think there was any actual classification of, hey, nose biter, weirdo. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Focus back on the presser.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Hell.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

I'll focus back on.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Talking about the holidays.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

I do have to ask, did you ever believe in Santa Claus?

SPEAKER_01 1:43

I don't think so. I don't ever remember looking for Santa. We never had a fireplace, never curious about him getting into the house. So I think from an early age, just because, you know, how our mom was, and we'll get into that coming up in a minute, but yeah, I don't think so.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

I didn't either. I I never ever believed in Santa Claus. And I think if I remember right, they wanted us to know where they escaped from. And it wasn't Santa. It was from them, which is cool, you know.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

It's kind of weird that you asked that because I actually believed more in the tooth fairy, or did at that point than Santa Claus, because the tooth fairy put the tooth under your pillow and then you get a buck or whatever it was, and they didn't come clean on that because probably it was just a dollar. But to your point, when there were more presents involved and money and buying stuff, I think our mom and dad wanted credit.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

I don't think I ever got any money from the tooth fairy for you knocking out my tooth right there. So anyway, again I digress. Tooth fairy.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

One of my biggest memories from Christmas is that Christmas was never really a surprise on Christmas Eve. And again, we opened up our presents the the night before. However, we would have presents under the tree sometimes for weeks, starting at Thanksgiving. So a month in advance, we'd have presents under the tree. And sometimes a lot. Some parents hide the presents in the bedroom. They have to always worry about the kids looking and finding them and snooping. And I don't think we ever really had to do that because our folks are pretty good about wrapping them and putting them under the tree right away. However, the big thing with our mom was that she told us what every single present was before Christmas. And not all at once. It was kind of like they just leaked out over those several weeks where you'd be sitting there one night, early December. Our mom would look at a present, we'd be looking at it, eyeballing it, and our mom would say, Donnie, do you want to know what's in that box? And I was like, hmm, is that a really? I can find out this is the thing, but it's not Christmas yet. Oh yeah, Donnie, I'll tell you right now, there's a G.I. Joe in there. I'd be like, what? Okay, cool. So I know what that present is. It's a G.I. Joe. Well, a couple of days later, there's another box, and I'd be eyeballing it. Donnie, do you know what's in that present? No, I shouldn't tell you. And I'm like, yeah, no, don't tell me. But I'm gonna, anyway. There's a tape recorder in that box. Oh, okay. So this again, this leakage that happened over the month of December meant that by Christmas Eve, there was not one single surprise. Every single present, you kind of knew what it was. But our mom also kind of teed it up with our dad, where she said, When you open up the present on Christmas Eve, Donna, you need to act surprised. So when you open up and there was the tape recorder, you had to do the ho.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

Wow. Now I know why we didn't believe in Santa Claus. That was no longer a puzzle.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

Santa Claus was not showing up in early December and then basically letting you know what's in the present. Our belief in Santa was never there because we always knew where the presents came from. It came from our mom and dad. And then again, by the time Christmas rolled around, you knew what every single present was. And the crazy part, Judy, is that you mentioned it earlier, we were spoiled. I think there were times where there were probably 90 presents under the tree. We each got 30, and it was a ton of stuff. And it wasn't like little knickknacks or stocking stuffers. In fact, I don't even think mom and dad really kind of believed in stocking stuffers. I don't remember really even having a stocking. I just remember having wrapped presents under the tree. But again, no surprise, we knew what they all were.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

So many presents that we fell asleep opening presents on Christmas. That obviously says the magnitude of how spoiled we were that we had that many presents. Christmas Day wasn't even a thing for us. I still don't look at Christmas Day as a holiday.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

Christmas Day was kind of boring. It was kind of play day where we would just kind of get up excited and go, I'm going to play with the 30 things that I just got. And then we'd get together and we'd play G.I. Joe's, we'd start tape recording, we'd start playing with other presents that we got. And it just ended up kind of being this big day where you just from sunup till sunset were playing with toys and doing that kind of stuff. Now in there you had a dinner, we had a Christmas Day dinner, and that was always a little bit of a distraction for us because we were still interested at that point playing with our toys.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Do you remember that toy, that electric football set, which I know you ended up throwing on the back of my head and I had to get stitches? That's a different issue. Wow. It had those little football players, that board that would vibrate so much that the players would dip over.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Those things would just kind of scatter all over the place, and some of them would fall over. And I think one of the sets we had was actually the Cowboys and the Cardinals. The Cowboys had the star logo, but for some reason the Cardinals just had white helmets. I don't know if they couldn't get the decal on there or whatever it was. So they were red. The Cowboys I think were white, and that was such a crazy goofy game. I can't even imagine playing that today and having any kind of semblance of, oh, this is cool.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

Christmas was big and it was special. Again, not Santa Claus special, but I mean, obviously we got a lot of things and it was fun and the toys were fun and it was just a fun experience uh to get that many toys. But when we were older and you had kids, Cassie, your daughter, she was like we had gone to her Christmas show in first grade, which is uh kind of funny because I think I had my dad's attitude about a lot of stuff where everything's bullshit. We go to the Christmas show and uh they sing and they're terrible. You know, the kids sing of course they're first graders or whatever, but you know, you're supporting, you know, the niece in the show. And then she's a second grader. People are gonna just vote me off the island here in a minute. Think I'm a horrible aunt. But Cassie comes up to me and she's like, Judy, Aunt Judy, are you are you gonna come to my Christmas show? And I'm like, Well, it depends. And she's like, I'm what? And I'm like, Are you better than you were last year? And she said, No. And I said, Well, then I'm not coming.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Wow. She's all excited, you know, thinking, Oh, Judy's just messing with me. No, Judy didn't show up. Judy didn't come. They weren't any better.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

I find it interesting that you skipped over one of the Christmas stories. And I find it interesting that the story had to do with you having to wear a little suit. And I'm gonna use the word little. You had a red jacket and a bow tie, but we had to dress up. I actually, it might be the only sighting for people of me in a dress for probably 50 years, but you had a bright red suit jacket that you had to wear proudly with your bow tie.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Later when I went to school, it was the same way, dressing like JFK. So started at an early age, and yeah, we had to dress up. I still kind of do that a little bit today. If I go over to the folks' house on a holiday or Christmas or whatever, I will actually dress up a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

I know I talked about that I ditched uh Cassie's Christmas show, but like I was in third or fourth grade and I got asked to sing Silent Night. I was supposed to sing Silent Night at the Christmas show. And, you know, dress up like a little angel. I had this little halo thing, this little white dress that I was gonna wear, and then I got in trouble for swearing. And I think I would say, and the swearing back then was different than swearing now, not like F bombs or whatever. But if you said God, it was like the end of the world back then, and it's still disrespectful today. They said you don't get to sit in that show because you have to get your swearing under control. I got robbed of that. Maybe there was some kind of resentment, and that's why I really didn't go to Cassie's show. I didn't tell you that wasn't kind of the end of our big Christmas things. I did want to ask you something. What was the best Christmas gift you ever got?

SPEAKER_01 9:31

Getting a tape recorder for me was massive because now I could actually tape things, whether it's my voice or Casey Case them on the radio or whatever it was. So the tape recorder was always something kind of cool that I got. I will tell you real quick, the goofiest thing or the worst thing I got, I think was a hunting rifle that dad bought me. And I thought, wow, dad trusts me with a gun. And I got a rifle, and it wasn't under the tree, it was hidden out in the garage. So after Christmas, after all the presents were opened up, he kind of took me out to the garage and said, Hey, here's what I bought you. I got excited for a brief second and then really never saw that gun again, never used it, never shot it. It was the Christmas present that wasn't.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Maybe that was one of the guns, the rifles that we picked and ran around with in the backyard with the dive roll, and that was probably the only time you got to touch that gun.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

If we would have done a ballistics test on that gun, it might have actually gotten used that night.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

My best gift that I got, and it's funny because I'm shocked that my mom was able to keep it a secret. And this was after you wrecked my Mercury Cougar. I'm driving home for Christmas in that car, and it is barely making it. And there's a whole line of cars in front of our house as I'm pulling up. I'm like, what's there a traffic jam in this little road for? Just didn't seem normal. Well, there were all these lights in the front of our house, which is usual, you know, because the folks had everything decorated really nice. What they did is they went and got me a new car. And uh it was uh 19, I don't know, something Honda. They had all these lights, and my dad was out in the below zero weather tying this big red bow on it. It was so exciting to get that. And of course they're like, Well, that's all you're getting. And I'm like, hello, that's all I expect. And then my mom's like, why don't you go downstairs? Your dad's waiting for you. And I'm like, okay, why isn't he outside when I'm getting this new car? Well, Harry was downstairs playing out my new brand new Atari super system.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Yeah, it was the best Christmas ever.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Judy, that was the Christmas. I got a chunk of coal. I got that's all I got. You got a car, you got an Atari, I got a chunk of coal.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Well, it might have been after your season of mayhem.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

The thing I remember about your car is they had it a couple of spotlights on it. Yeah. So you could see it from like a half a block away. What's going on in this front yard? There's two spotlights like you see on a TV commercial with this car all lit up. The only thing missing was like a puppy running out. So transitioning to birthdays. Now we talked about Christmas. Christmas, very interesting at the Schneider household. Birthdays, pretty much the same thing. I gotta ask you, did you ever, your entire life, have a birthday party? No, not ever. Not one. Not one. Not one. I wonder why that is. Judy, I had I had one. I remember I had one birthday party, and it was probably when I was like 10 years old. I was into model airplanes, model cars. You and I were both into that with the glue and the painting and putting them together and whatnot. And I think I had a party that year where a bunch of neighbor kids came over, like seven or eight of them. Everybody brought over a model airplane, a model car. We had birthday cake, everybody sang happy birthday. And I thought, oh my gosh, what is this? This is super cool. I can hardly wait until my next birthday. This is a new thing. No, it's not. No, it's not. Judy, that was it. One and done. Never had another birthday for me.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

I was like 10. Never again. And nothing in high school, nothing for your 16th, nothing for my 16th, nothing for well, 18. Were you even at home anymore?

SPEAKER_01 13:00

No, I was in Minneapolis at 18. 21. I was in uh state penitentiary in where no, I'm kidding, but I was I was living somewhere else. So I think I was living at Bismarck.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

I love Donnie those model airplanes. I just have to go in those model cars and stuff like that. Those were awesome.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

Putting the decals on and the stickers and gluing it together. And then the surprise and the glue. Well, and also the surprise and disappointment after you put the model together. I wonder what all these leftover pieces are.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

I wonder if those are important. Those were fun gifts.

SPEAKER_01 13:36

Judy, the other thing that was weird about our birthday was kind of like Christmas, where we knew what everything was. Birthday, I got my birthday present in April. Or, and my birthday's in July. So it would be, you know, March, April, or May, and mom would come home with something. And it might be clothes, it might be a toy, it might be whatever. She'd give it to you, but it wasn't just a rando gift. This was like, hey, Dottie, I got you this. These are new clothes now. This is for your birthday in July. Don't forget. And I'm like, oh, okay. Well, you get excited. It's March or April. You got new clothes, or you get a new toy. Hey, this works. I'll I'll work with this. Except the weird part was then when July rolled around, when your birthday actually rolled around, October for you, our mom would come up and say, Now, Daddy, remember what you got for your birthday back in March. Yeah. And I'd be, I'd be like, on my birthday, not remembering. I'd be like, and then she would get mad if you didn't remember exactly what she bought you four months before that. So you had to say, like, oh yeah, didn't I get a shirt? And then my mom would say, No, you got a new G.I. Joe and a new blah, blah, blah. And I'd be like, shoot, okay, I completely forgot about that. And then I'd have to go find it. Hopefully it wasn't broken and start playing with it on my birthday because the birthday present, like Christmas, where you knew everything what it was, you knew every single present. The birthday, you did as well because you got the birthday present months in advance.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

And that still happens to this day. I mean, it that is something that has been a thing for 50 years. I think some of it is that they were excited about, they saw something, which is cool, and they got you something. They were so excited to give it to you, they had to give it to you right then and there, tell you what it was, remind you what it was, quiz you on what it was. All of those kind of in that sequence. But yeah, that's exactly right. Happens to this day, Christmas birthdays.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

I got, I think, a gift card back in March or April from mom and dad, and with the little saying, Hey, this is for your birthday coming up in July. And then you're like, Oh, okay. Which, you know, nowadays it's no big deal. But when you're a kid and your birthday rolls around and you get nothing, you get squat, you're kind of like a little bit of a bummer. Was it an Applebee's gift card? I think it was Jersey Mike's. This also translated to me as an adult because when I got married and Diana had Crystal, and Crystal, I think, was three when I met her. And I remember we're rolling around to the first April with Crystal's birthday, and Diana's like, yeah, we gotta do a big party for Crystal. And I'm like, Party? What for? She's turning four. That's not like a milestone. And Diana's like, no, we're doing a birthday party. We do birthday parties for kids. We're gonna do that every year. And I'm like, we are? I never got a party. I I had one party growing up. No, this isn't a thing. And part of me being the cheapskate Donnie aspect of me too, I was like, hmm, how much is this party gonna cost? And what does this look like? And etc. Diana flat out looked at me and said, I don't know what happened. I don't care what happened in your childhood. We're having parties. We're having birthday parties every single year. Get used to it. Well, then I had three daughters, so times three. So let's say, you know, 18 times three, whatever that is. We had a party every single year. Every year.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

The parties that probably even for your kids wasn't like the parties of today where you're all like at the bowling alley or the roller rink or whatever. I mean, it was just a party with a bunch of kids over, but still a big to-do. We had nothing about that. Nothing. Even our Thanksgivings were Thanksgiving was terrible. I don't mean to digress from the birthday thing, but it and I don't mean that the food was terrible, although I think we might have something to say about that, but wait, that's an adulthood. But we had two channels uh growing up. There was just two channels on TV. So you had to wait all day to watch the lame ass lions play at the time, or the cowboys, but it was such a boring day.

SPEAKER_01 17:36

We talked about it on one of our earlier podcasts. We never had relatives over. We have our cousin down in Bismarck, we have our aunt and uncle, we have grandma and grandpa, and Thanksgiving every single year, kind of just like birthdays and Christmas, where basically it was just us hunkered down with just us, nobody else. Nobody else was invited over. We had our meal, whatever it is. Now, in regards to you just touched on it, the Thanksgiving dinners that have gone awry in recent years, we're gonna actually save that for a fast forward coming up at some point in time. Thanksgiving, just like Christmas, just like birthdays, and probably worse with Thanksgiving, to your point, two TV stations. Usually the weather was crappy, you couldn't go outside and play. It was the start of a four-day boar fest. Four days. Yes, it was horrible. What the hell are we gonna do?

SPEAKER_00 18:27

It's funny, and I always wanted to host Thanksgiving after I moved out just to make it better. And it wasn't for lack of effort and lack of trying, it was just more a sign of the times. And one just quick little reminder for folks feel free to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and also we are now on TikTok. So you can follow us there too and email us at hello at stories from the middle of nowhere. It was one of our listeners that helped us solve that 60-year secret. Don't be shy about emailing us in.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

By the way, we love getting pictures as well. Any photo evidence that still exists from back in the day, whether it's of us or whether it's of you or anything, love to take a look at it. And if it doesn't end up on the podcast, at the very least, we can use it on social media or our website. Judy, real quick, one more birthday thing I gotta tell real quick is the Cassie story. We teased it heading into season two, all about getting banned from mom and dad's house. And this is her birthday. This is birthday weekend. Cassie's got her birthday in April. She wants to spend the night with Oma and Opa. And that gives Diane and I a little bit of a break. And we're like, yeah, all about that. And I remember exactly how this went down. And, you know, we have a night off. Cassie's with the grandparents. What could possibly ever go wrong in this scenario? Without anybody knowing our mom and dad, you know, you probably think nothing. Well, knowing our mom and dad, there's several things that can go wrong. What happened was the next day, and I think it was like a Sunday morning, I call dad, and he answers the phone. Hello. Hey, how's it going? Not that good. And Judy, when your daughter is spending the night at Omanopa's house with your parents, that's the last thing you want to hear. Not that good. And I'm like, what do you mean, not that good? What's going on? Cassie's banned. I go, Cassie's banned. Yeah, Cassie, Cassie's not going to be allowed to come over here anymore. And I go, what? What happened? Well, we had a bird nest up in the in the backyard with some eggs in it, and now the nest is gone. So she took the nest down. We can't have that. And we don't want her over here anymore. Yeah, she's going to be banned from here. Judy, I lost, I lost it. I thought, oh my God, really? And I felt bad, you know, that the nest got taken down. That's not a cool thing. And, you know, that might be a life lesson or, you know, kind of explain to Cassie.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

Don't murder the birds.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

Yeah. You know, hey, later in life you'll hear about the birds and the bees maybe at 19, but definitely don't take down the bird nest in Oma Opa's backyard. Well, I immediately got off the phone and I think I was driving somewhere, and I called Diana and I said, She goes, What's going on? I go, go to my parents' house and get Cassie. And she's like, what for? And I go, she just got kicked out. Everybody's freaking out. Mom and dad are all grumpy. I'm like furious at this point that a six-year-old is getting banned from grandparents' house. I still think that's just weird as crap. So I basically called up Diana and I said, hey, get over there and get her and let's make sure she doesn't go over there for a while. Now, eventually the ban went away. It wasn't like Pete Rose. It wasn't a lifetime ban, but it was a ban for a little while.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

You know what? There was a few other things at play with that. So, yes, the bird nest. Is she a bird murderer? You know, we don't know, bird murderer. But she also was in their cabinet with my mom's hummels, and she had turned all the hummels backwards, like their faces weren't showing. So maybe, you know, they were like, something's amiss there.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

If her name was Damien and she was a boy, I'd be like, Yeah, okay. Something weird going on.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Let's check her scalp for any initials or numbers up there. I wanted to pivot for a second too to Easter because again, you know, you had that one birthday party. You had a really nice birthday party, but that was it. It was one and done. And I think our folks were really good at they would do something big once, and then that was it. It was like that should settle kind of whatever it is, interest that we would have in any of this stuff. So Easter, one year and only one year. We had the best Easter egg hunt ever. And I remember like a lot of people have well, we had a lot of eggs and things like that. We had a lot of different eggs hidden with candy and stuff, but our plastic eggs had money in them. Not like big money, but what like at the time, a $20 bill was like the grand prize, and it was like the best Easter ever.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

One and done. Let's have a lifetime Easter egg hunt for the kids at whatever age we were, and that's it. You know, that's we're never gonna do this again, and we're never gonna celebrate Easter again. And it was just weird. But yeah, we had that Easter egg hunt. There'd be money in there, there'd be candy in there. We also even got some presents that were in the Easter basket. And again, we you know weren't surprised by the presents because they weren't wrapped, and they told you what they were ahead of time, or your basket would be laying there and you kind of see what was in it. Yeah, we just had one and done with a lot of things we did. Weird.

SPEAKER_00 23:19

It is, and one other just kind of rando thing about that Easter that I remember, because it was that same Easter our dog Snoopy was sitting on the front porch with his favorite toy and an Easter egg that said Snoopy on it, and he was all sitting out there all proud. But I think later that day he actually got egged by somebody driving by because people always were pissed because our dad was a cop, so we would have bad things happen to our house from time to time.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

Easter, we were celebrating, people were driving by and egging our dog. Poor Snoopy.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

Poor old Asian dog.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

What's going on?

SPEAKER_00 23:50

So as we're wrapping up, Donnie, I'm so looking forward to a next couple of episodes. And one of our dad's favorite sayings, and boy, did this carry over into adulthood too, is nothing good happens after midnight.