My niece Danielle got one of those ‘knot-yourself-a-quilt’ kits for Christmas. She’s quite crafty (and an amazing crocheter), so she got it out of the box yesterday evening and started to work on it next to me at the dining room table. (I was drinking Irish cream liqueur and knitting.) Once she got two squares together, she put it down and complained that it looked bad and wasn’t working. I took a look at it, and realized she needed to make two square knots, not one, in order to get the pieces to stay together. My mind was moving faster than my mouth, and instead of telling her she needs to knot it twice, out of my mouth came, “You need to twot it.” And I’m leaving the spelling just like that, but it sure sounded like there was an “a” in there instead of an “o”, thanks to the Chicago-esque vowel-flattening I inherited from my dad. And I looked across the table at James, and to my right, at Momma Linda, and all three of us burst into laughter, so then our niece started laughing (she’s 10) and said, “TWOT! ha ha!”…. much to my mortification. We immediately told her not to say it, and that what Auntie Jen MEANT was two knots, but somehow by the next day, the large bottle of St. Brendan’s Irish Cream Liqueur had been renamed “Twot Juice”.
What can I say? I like to make the holidays special, however I can.
