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Christmas 2020: Mittens on Mittens

With Christmas recently past us, a lot of the chatter and mental energy has recently been directed towards Christmas in the last couple of weeks. That naturally means that my stories and blog posts are going to be Christmas-themed for a bit, so strap in, boys and girls. It's time for a few Christmas tales of amusement.

The first anecdote I'll start with has to do with movies. There are a few movies that are traditional around this time of year, but businesses in the movie industry also try to cash in on that trend by pumping out their own Christms movies. I will admit that the Mild Wife and I have watched our fair share of Christmas movies, including a rom-com or two. It's not even so much that we expected them to be a ton of fun or great literary works, but we just got into the spirit of Christmas, and we felt like watching something Christmas-related.

However, some of these movies are Christmas traditions. For a bunch of people, that list includes "The Sound of Music," even though the movie itself doesn't explicitly mention the holiday. I'm not even entirely sure why this came to be, but I definitely remember the movie playing during Christmas when I was a kid. 

Still, it was a long-ish movie, so Young-Me never quite had the patience to sit through the whole thing. Sure, I watched enough of it in bits and pieces to know the plot, but I don't recall ever watching the entire movie, from start to finish. It just wasn't something that I did.

Well, the Mild Wife set out to do something about it this year. We planned one afternoon solely around this activity, to make sure that we had nothing else going on that required our attention. Then, we plunked down and watched "The Sound of Music."

It was fun, and I did appreciate being able to fully piece together the entire plot. Like I said, I'd watched enough of the pieces that I knew what happened, but I still had slight gaps in my memory. This let me fill those gaps, and appreciate the movie just a little bit more.

The best part, though, was that both the Mild Wife and I got some of the songs stuck in our head, and we were humming bits and pieces of the songs afterward. Remember, though, I didn't exactly have this movie memorized. For all that I knew the tunes and even most of the lyrics ("doe, a deer, a female deer" is enough of a classic that I had that one down), there were a few that I couldn't quite recall on command.

So, I inevitably forgot a line. That led to this:

Me: "Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, something something, uh, mittens on mittens."

I knew that that second line ended with "mittens," but I couldn't quite recall the lead up to it. Not wanting to stop the melody, though, I filled in the lyrics with words that kept the rhythm going. That led to this blog post's title.

You know who does know the words in this household? Yup, the Mild Wife. She overheard me, and immediately asked me to repeat myself, barely holding back the laughter. She wanted to make sure that she had, indeed, heard "mittens on mittens." And once that I did confirm this, she burst out laughing. I can't exactly blame her, that was a goofy interpretation at best.

I have since learned the actual lyrics ("bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens"), but, given the reaction that my version got, I will submit that "mittens on mittens" is not going away anytime soon.

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