Tampa Photography Blog

We typically spend Christmas Day with our good friends Bob and Letty Best. They are kind enough to invite our family as well as several others to join them. Letty sets a beautiful table with a gorgeous holiday centerpiece, her finest China and stemware, place cards, and a favor for each of her guests. One year she put a lottery ticket by everyone's name and as we were seated, she told us to scratch it off to see if there were any big winners! Sure enough, I had three matching numbers! I didn't share this with anyone, but very excitedly, began to scratch off the place to reveal how much money my prize was! 10,000!!!!! Vanity had prevented me from wearing my glasses, but I was almost certain that is what it said. I started screaming! I won! I won! I won 10,000! I was sitting next to a nun and I even promised to give 1,000 to her order! Letty just let me go on and on for what seemed to be an infinity...until she finally told me to turn over the lottery ticket...at which time I found out that it was a "fake" ticket that she had purchased at Wooden Nickel in Tampa. Ha! Ha! Very funny! By the way, we still are friends and we still go to her house on Christmas Day.

The year was 1982. I was 13, and my little sister was 7. There were only 3 things I wanted for Christmas this year, and I provided my mother with the following list: A Rick Springfield Poster, Rick Springfield’s “Working Class Dog” album on cassette, AND a red walkman. Such a simple list…just three small items. I awoke Christmas morning confident my Christmas dreams would come true. As we piled up our presents in front of us and began to open them, I started to feel a little nervous because all my presents looked like clothes boxes and my sister had a suspicious tubular present in her pile. She tore that open to find, not one, but TWO Rick Springfield posters nestled inside. As I briefly gazed into Rick’s eyes and admired how good he looked in that white wife beater t-shirt, I quietly commented, “I wanted the Rick Springfield poster.” A few present later, my sister opened a “Working Class Dog” cassette. As she threw it aside I stated a little louder “I wanted that album.” When my sister opened that red walkman, I turned as red as said walkman, I began spitting and speaking in tongues and I demanded that she relinquish these gifts to me, because “I ONLY WANTED 3 THINGS FOR CHRISTMAS MOM AND YOU GAVE THEM ALL TO HER!!!!” “Huh, that’s funny,” my mother replied “I must have mixed up the lists.” My sister refused to give me the gifts that rightfully belonged to me, but I am no longer bitter about this. Not. at. all.

It was a typical McOlgan-Freeman Christmas. The relatives were in town, we had a fabulous dinner, opened gifts & played for the remainder of the evening. The boy cousins, Lance & Paul, were put in charge of taking out the trash, while the parents continued enjoying their holiday libations. The next morning when the Freeman's were loading the car to return home, they couldn't find the bags of gifts they had packed up the evening before. Well, wouldn't you know it, the boys took out the trash all right, as well as, all the gifts that were placed for "safe keeping" in the large black trash bags! So, off the adults went to the dump, where they proceeded to go through the latest drop-off of the day. No luck, the gifts were buried under piles of holiday trash & were never recovered! The story did have a happy ending; however, as the McOlgan's homeowner's insurance did cover the repurchase of all those fabulous gifts!