#someday I will achieve facial consistency
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various doodles of courier 6, & some friends
#fallout new vegas#courier six#craig boone#veronica santangelo#arcade gannon#someday I will achieve facial consistency#idk man faces n heads are hard#qs art#fan art#qs ocs
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BASIC QUESTIONS
First name? “Frederick.”
Surname? “Frederickson.”
Middle names? “Flamarion.”
Nicknames? “Fred, Freddie, Dumbass, Knuckle Head, Idiot, Mr. Fred, Lizard Guy, Fredzilla… Fredzilla totally counts.”
Date of birth? “I was born on August 15th of 1997.”
Age? “I am twenty three years young.”
PHYSICAL / APPEARANCE
Height? “Six foot even.”
Weight? “140 or something. Don’t body shame me.”
Build? “I guess I’d be a mesomorph.”
Hair color? “It’s blond-ish.”
Hair style? “Medium length. Sometimes it is straight, sometimes it has luscious waves.”
Eye color? “Grue. (That means green-blue.)”
Eye shape? “They’re kind of squinty, whatever you call that.”
Glasses or contact lenses? “No sir!”
Distinguishing facial features? “I have a big nose.”
Which facial feature is most prominent? “My nose.”
Which bodily feature is most prominent? “My chest.”
Other distinguishing features? “My hair. If you see my hair, you know it’s me.”
Skin? “White. Disturbingly white. I should get more sun…”
Hands? “Big.”
Make up? “I don’t understand how people wear makeup everyday. It’s hard. It would take me hours to not look like a clown. I wore eye shadow for the pride parade, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”
Scars? “Nothing too noticeable.”
Birthmarks? “Nada!”
Tattoos? “None, but I think one day I’ll get a big monster on my entire back .”
Physical handicaps? “I don’t have any.”
Type of clothes? “Worn out.”
How do you wear your clothes? “Too long.”
What are your feet like? “Also big. My socks are dirty. So are my shoes. There’s a hole in my favorite pair, and the bottom is coming off…”
Race / Ethnicity? “Caucasian.”
Mannerisms? “I am overexciteable and it shows.”
Are you in good health? “I keep forgetting to make a doctor’s appointment. Actually, I just don’t wanna do it by myself. But probably.”
Do you have any disabilities? “Fortunately no!”
PERSONALITY
What words or phrases do you overuse? “I think I just shout too often.”
Do they you a catchphrase? “I say whoa-ho-ho a lot. Is that a catchphrase? Or should I have said that for my overused word and/or phrase?”
Are you more optimistic or pessimistic? “Optimistic!”
Are you introverted or extroverted? “Extroverted.”
Do you ever put on airs? “I turn the AC on a lot.”
What bad habits do you have? “Sometimes I chew with my mouth open and I stay up too late and I ramble and I don’t eat healthy foods and get obsessed with entertainment and I don’t blink enough when I’m playing video games and I choose being lazy over being productive and, oh, yeah, run-on sentences.”
What makes you laugh out loud? “A lot of things. I laugh all the time.”
How do you display affection? “Bear hugs and hair ruffles.”
Mental handicaps? “I don’t give myself time to be sad.”
How do you want to be seen by others? “Helpful, loving, loyal, genuine, fun!”
How do you see yourself? “Helpful, loving, loyal, genuine, fun!”
How are you seen by others? “I don’t worry about it too much.”
Strongest character trait? “I care so much.”
Weakest character trait? “I care too much.”
How competitive are you? “I can be kind of competitive, but I don’t trash talk or anything.”
Do you make snap judgements or take time to consider? “It depends on the situation, but I usually make snap judgements.”
How do you react to praise? “A lot of thank you!s and beaming.”
How do you react to criticism? “I don’t usually let it get to me, I try to be better.”
What is your greatest fear? “Losing another person I love.”
What are your biggest secrets? “Sometimes I say I know what I’m doing when I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. Shh.”
What is your philosophy of life? “Life is short, have fun.”
When was the last time you cried? “I don’t remember. A long time ago.”
What haunts you? “Losing Tadashi. Not being able to save him.”
What are your political views? “I’m probably a liberal.”
What will you stand up for? “Anyone that needs me to stand up for them.”
Who do you quote? “My friends. They’re so smart.”
Are you indoorsy or outdoorsy? “Indoorsy.”
What is your sinful little habit? “Buying a lot of merch. A lot of merch.”
What sense do you most rely on? “Definitely not common. Hearing.”
How do you treat people better than you? “I try to learn from them!”
How do you treat people worse than you? “I try to teach them!”
What quality do you most value in a friend? “Genuineness.”
What do you consider an overrated virtue? “Chastity.”
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? “I think I’d like to be smarter. Just a little bit, just enough to understand half of the things my friends talked about.”
What is your obsession? “Manga, comic books, video games.”
What are your pet peeves? “Being rushed, people being mean, being ignored.”
What are your idiosyncrasies? “I talk too fast.”
FRIENDS AND FAMILY
Is your family big or small? Who does it consist of? “Small. It’s just me, my dad, my mom and Heathcliff — the butler.”
What is your perception of family? “They’re supposed to be loving and accepting.”
Do you have siblings? Older or younger? “No. I think that would’ve been nice, though.”
Describe your best friend. “I have five, and they’re the best friends in the whole world. Tadashi isn’t here anymore, but he’s still one of my best friends. They’re all smart and unique and I love being around them.”
Ideal best friend? “Anyone who can be themselves around me.”
Describe your other friends. “Most of them are online.”
Describe your acquaintances. “I don’t have acquaintances, just friends.”
Do you have any pets? “I have a bunch of fish in my saltwater aquarium!”
Who are your natural allies? “Hm, Haven.”
Who are your surprising allies? “The rest of our friends.”
PAST AND FUTURE
What were you like as a baby? As a child? “Loud, wild, energetic, friendly.”
Did you grow up rich or poor? “Rich.”
Did you grow up nurtured or neglected? “I don’t want to say my parents neglected me…”
What is the most offensive thing you ever said? “I don’t even know of anything I’ve thought that was offensive.”
What is your greatest achievement? “My current grades.”
What was your first kiss like? “Quick and nervous.”
What is the worst thing you did to someone you loved? “I didn’t save Tadashi.”
What are your ambitions? “I want to write comics that people want to read.”
What advice would you give your younger self? “Enjoy being a kid while you can!”
What smells remind you of your childhood? “Freshly cut grass, pancakes, steak.”
What was your childhood ambition? “To be a superhero.”
What is your best childhood memory?
What is your worst childhood memory? “The birthday my dad told me they’d be home in time for, but missed. They didn’t come home for another week, and I’m pretty sure he forgot about it completely, because the handwriting on the card that ‘came in the mail’ looked an awful lot like Heathcliff’s.”
Did you have an imaginary childhood friend? “A few.”
When was the last time you were crushed with disappointment? “Sometime last month.”
What past act are you most ashamed of? “Shame is not an emotion I know.”
What past act are you most proud of? “Beating Dark Souls (Demons Souls).”
Has anyone ever saved your life? “Probably.”
Strongest childhood memory? “The day I broke my arm falling out of a tree.”
LOVE
Do you believe in love at first sight? “Why not?”
Are you in a relationship? “Nope.”
How do you behave in a relationship? “Like myself. I’m an affectionate guy.”
When did you last have sex? “It’s been about five months, probably.”
What sort of sex do you have? “All sorts.”
Have you ever been in love? “I fall in love all the time.”
Have you ever had your heart broken? “My heart broke when Tadashi… when I lost my friend.”
CONFLICT
How do you respond to a threat? “Just shrug and say ‘bring it’.”
Are you most likely to fight with your fists or your tongue? “I don’t like fighting, but I’ll do what a situation calls for.”
What is your kryptonite? “Funko Pops.”
If you could only save one thing from your burning house, what would it be? “My fish.”
How do you perceive strangers? “50/50. Could be friends, could be villains.”
What do you love to hate? “Cliffhangers and hard to beat games.”
What are your phobias? “Death.”
What is your choice of weapon? “Depends on the game I’m playing.”
What living person do you most despise? “I don’t despise anyone.”
Have you ever been bullied or teased? “I’ve been teased, but it doesn’t bother me much.”
Where do you go when you’re angry? “The kitchen to get a snack. The only time I get angry is when a game is being really frustrating.”
Who are your enemies and why? “I don’t have any, but maybe one day I will be a true crime fighter and I will.”
WORK, EDUCATION AND HOBBIES
What is your current job? “Sign spinning.”
What do you think about your current job? “I love it. I don’t need the money, I just like bringing in more business to the local shops and showing off my skills!”
What are some of your past jobs? “I’ve never had to work.”
What are your hobbies? “Sign flipping, gaming, writing and drawing, reading comics, binging anime, practicing guitar, coming up with new costume ideas.”
Educational background? “I didn’t do so hot in high school, but I’m in college now.”
Intelligence level? “You could say I’m a selective learner.”
Do you have any specialist training? “I wish! That would be so cool!”
Do you have a natural talent for something? “I want to say my sign spinning is a natural talent — I kind of just picked it up one day and realized I was good at it. Also, super-hearing, headlights and flame throwing.”
Do you play a sport? Are you any good? “I’m not much of a sports guy.”
What is your socioeconomic status? “Ask someone who knows what that means.”
FAVORITES
What is your favorite animal? “Maybe lizards.”
Which animal do you dislike the most? “I don’t dislike any animals.”
What place would you most like to visit? “I’d like to go on a family vacation someday. I don’t really care where we go.”
What is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? “The ending of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.”
What is your favorite song? “You’d laugh.”
Music, art, reading preferred? “Reading mixed with art.”
What is your favorite color? “Blue. No, orange. No, green! Yellow! I don’t know! There’s too many colors!”
What is your password? “FredzillaRulesTheWorld.”
Favorite food: “Changes too often to really say.”
What is your favorite work of art? “Death Note.”
Who is your favorite artist? “My dad. He counts, right?”
What is your favorite day of the week? “Sunday.”
POSSESSIONS
What is in your fridge? “A whole lot of ingredients I’ll never use and probably some I can’t pronounce.”
What is on your bedside table? “A lot of junk. I should clean that off...”
What is in your car? “Phone charger, aux chord, a half eaten bag of barbecue chips, stick of deodorant, loose change, hair ties.”
What is in your bin? “It’s empty. I have a butler.”
What is in your purse or wallet? “A group picture with my friends, money, a few different bank cards, a condom, more loose change.”
What is in your pockets? “My keys and my cell phone.”
What is your most treasured possession? “All of my pictures with my friends. I wouldn’t trade them for the world. You never know when you won’t be able to take another one...”
SPIRITUALITY
Who or what is your character’s guardian angel? “I’m sure Tadashi is somewhere looking out for me right now.”
Do you believe in the afterlife? “Yes.”
What are your religious views? “Loosely Christian.”
What do you think heaven is? “A place where everyone is happy and free and there’s no pain. And you can play games all day.”
What do you think hell is? “Sad and lonely.”
Are you superstitious? “A little bit.”
What would you like to be reincarnated as? “A fire breathing dragon!”
How would you like to die? “In a way that matters. If I’m going to die, I’d like to save someone while I’m doing it.”
What is your spirit animal? “Probably iguanas or something.”
What is your zodiac sign? “Leo.”
VALUES
What do you think is the worst thing that can be done to a person? “Torture.”
What is your view of ‘freedom’? “Pretty much how my life is now. I can do what I want, when I want --- for the most part.”
When did you last lie? “It’s been a long time. I don’t lie unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
What’s your view of lying? “It can be easily avoided. Just be honest.”
When did you last make a promise? “I can’t remember.”
Did you keep or break your last promise? “I’m sure I kept it, I don’t make promises unless I plan to do something about it.”
DAILY LIFE
What are your eating habits? “Questionable.”
Do you have any allergies? “I’m allergic to assholes!”
Describe your home. “It’s big. Real big. The yard is big and freshly cut. There’s not a blimp of imperfection until you get to my room, then it becomes a randomized mess.”
Are your minimalist or a clutter hoarder? “Hoarder.”
What do you do first thing on a weekday morning? “Turn my alarm off.”
What do you do on a Sunday afternoon? “Relax. Wait for my dad to call.”
What do you do on a Friday night? “Stay up late gaming.”
What is your soft drink of choice? “Mountain Dew.”
What is your alcoholic drink of choice? “Just beer is fine.”
MISCELLANEOUS
What or who would you dress up as for Halloween? “Oh, I love Halloween! I go all out! I’ll dress as another superhero this year, or maybe a villain to spice it up!”
Are you comfortable with technology? “I love technology.”
If you could save one person, who would it be? “Tadashi. I wish I could’ve saved Tadashi.”
If you could call one person for help, who would it be? “Haven, she always knows what to do.”
What is your greatest extravagance? “All the merch in my room, or my tank.”
What is your greatest regret? “Not doing anything to help my friend.”
What is your perception of redemption? “Putting someone else before yourself. If you do that, if you selflessly risk your own life or needs or wants for another person, you’re obviously redeemed.”
What would you do if you won the lottery? “Donate it all to charity.”
What is your favorite fairytale? “Jack and the Beanstalk.”
What fairytale do you hate? “I don’t hate any fairytales. People put a lot of hard work into their stories and I respect that.”
Do you believe in happy endings? “I do.”
What is your idea of perfect happiness? “Living every day how you want to live it.”
What would you ask a fortune teller? “I’d give my opportunity to someone else. I don’t need anything answered.”
If you could travel through time, where would you go? “Back to save Tadashi or die trying.”
What sport do you excel at? “Is flame throwing a sport?”
What sport do you suck at? “Soccer. I get confused and score for the other team. Every. single. time.”
If you could have a superpower, what would you choose? “All of them! Fire breath, x-ray vision, flying, rocket fists, gravity manipulation, invisibility, walking through walls, the ability to teleport through people’s phones so if they needed me I’d be right there... yeah, all of them!”
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Project Compass 34
Read along on AO3 here
<< Previous Chapter << >> Next Chapter >>
This time: Vah’nya and Eli stage a rescue.
Next time: It has to be a Chiss.
-/
Vah’nya fell in behind Eli with grace, dropping out of a ventilation shaft and landing silently on the durasteel. It was an impressive feat, one Eli himself had not been capable of, being at least fifty-percent heavier than the Chiss woman. He’d been quiet, of course, but he hadn’t achieved the near-silence like she had.
It wasn’t their first time sneaking around through a ship’s bowels.
“At least we know our way around this one better,” She whispered on an exhale, earning a tilt of the head and one single dark eye appraising her.
Eli’s expression was grim. He could see things Vah’nya couldn’t, just like the possibilities and impressions she saw with her Sight that he would never be able to see. But for how skilled she was, for all her Sight, she lacked experience in sensitive missions like these. She had experience in hopeless situations - and this one had yet to come close to that particular instance though it had only just begun - but Eli knew she didn’t see the potential cracks or all the moving pieces just waiting to unravel. He had to be steps ahead of all of them, which wasn’t easy considering they were without communications until the bridge team secured their objective or the tech team found a workaround - a secondary objective for them as well.
Once upon a time, Eli had assumed Thrawn to be a man who could predict the future, who knew his enemies so intimately he could predict exactly which path they would choose. Now, Eli saw Thrawn and his other former commanders in a different light. Thrawn, perhaps, was the one closest to knowing his enemies, but he was not all-knowing, and he most certainly miscalculated more than Eli had ever caught on in the past. The difference was that he course corrected, saw the variables, anticipated the fluctuations and adapted before anyone could catch on.
Eli had had some time to work on that. Eli would never be the same kind of genius Thrawn was, would never things the way he did. Even so, Eli had managed to find his place, his role, maybe even his destiny amongst the Chiss people, and now only their enemies stood in the way of him claiming it.
And he would claim it. Both for himself, and for his charges - the Ascendancy’s greatest secret - who had come to depend on him.
“What’s the tracker saying?” Vah’nya asked.
“It’s been stationary for hours,” Eli replied. “Enemy’s employed too much jamming to get a good read, even with the additional frequencies. All I know is that it’s aboard this ship,” He slipped the tiny device back into a pouch on his belt. “And it doesn’t help us find Un’hee, so you’re up.”
The Navigator took a grounding breath, let her eyes fall closed and her facial muscles go slack as she reached out with her mind. Precognition came naturally as she experienced her life, but actively seeking to see with her additional sense was a skill that she’d been working to hone. She thought of Un’hee, of the bright spark of the child’s laughter, of her tears, of her goodness. Of that strength she’d shown, from the very first time she’d met the young Navigator years ago.
“The upper levels. Aft. I think I’ll get a better read on it as we get closer.”
Rubbing his chin for a moment, Eli considered her determination. “Executive officer quarters?” He suggested. “They’d be easy to repurpose into containment for lower-level staff who would have never had access to them, including Navigators,” He hedged, but even as he said that, it didn’t feel right. Judging by the face Vah’nya was making, she felt the same.
“No,” She refuted. “They’d want to question her. Maybe try to hold her against Captain Thrawn.” It was a sick thought, but their enemies had never displayed any sort of decency. “So the best place for that is-
“The medbay,” They decided together, taking the next corridor to the right and heading for the nearest turbolift.
“We’ll have to hurry to get there before the tech team cuts the power,” Eli reminded her.
“Or, they can power our lift and leave everyone else immobile.”
“You’re assuming the jammers go down with the rest of the systems, which isn’t likely. Besides, I’d like to do this with as few people expecting us as possible,” He said. “The last thing we need is to waste all our energy at the beginning. We’re gonna need it.”
Vah’nya pursed her lips. “I know, Eli,” She quipped. “Last time, I think that was the sort of thing I had been saying to you.” She didn’t dare think too hard about the horrific meaning behind her words.
The rest of their trek to the medbay that serviced the upper levels was spent in silence. Pointed looks took the place of verbal warnings, a tilt of the head mimicked a change in direction, a slow blink indicated the necessity of a detour. It wasn't a system meant to be used by the military. The nonverbal communication used by the CDF consisted of hand signals and taps with different meanings, a multifaceted language that allowed anyone to understand even with one or more senses obstructed. They knew it, every single being in the CDF was required to know of and be able to use it. They just didn't need it.
There had been times when they couldn't use it. When Eli's ears had been bleeding and his hands bound. Times when one or both of them had been too exhausted to move by more than seemingly insignificant twitches. What had befallen them had made them a great team. Unorthodox and certainly nowhere close to regulation, but an efficient team all the same.
When they had resumed active duty after their time in captivity, Eli had been worried that their new tactics would be frowned upon. Now, they would be invaluable against an enemy - especially one who would have noticed the military protocol and understood.
The turbolift stopped on the medbay's level with a small ding that echoed through the corridor. Guards were posted there, an indication that they were on the right path. Both Vah’nya and Eli dodged the first round of blasterfire from the three guardsmen waiting for them. They shot faster than their enemies could the second time, squeezing off fatal blows just milliseconds out of sync. The sound drew the attention of two more patrolling Chiss, both of whom fell just as quickly as the first.
Vah’nya looked at them in disdain. “They wear the enemy’s client uniforms by choice,” She scoffed. Eli wasn’t sure if she was using her Sight to see their intentions, nor if it worked on the dead. Now wasn’t the time to find out, though he made a note to ask her later. It was important for him to have a more complete understanding of her abilities. “And for what?”
“Maybe they truly thought a long con would work,” Eli considered.
“You and I both know that there is no way to work with that kind of evil.”
“Maybe not yet,” At her insistent look, he held up his hands, blaster turned toward the far wall but still tucked in his left palm. He rolled his eyes, and agreed ruefully, “Maybe not ever. But don’t ever close yourself off to a potential outcome just because it seems unlikely. Desperation makes a being do crazy things, some of which you can turn to your advantage if you need to.”
“Yes, perhaps if they came to us,” The Navigator huffed, tucking away the knowledge, knowing that Eli was trying to impart wisdom that might not help her in this, but could help her in another situation someday. “But I know they are evil. I see it. We cannot approach them. They will only take.”
“I know,” He relented, then paused to listen for any potential movement in their direction. “Shall we?”
“Lead the way.”
They met little resistance as they stole through the upper levels. As Vah’nya’s Sight pulled at her, giving her confidence in their heading, so too did the tiny receiver in Eli’s possession attempt to give out a still jumbled but slightly better . They couldn’t be sure if that was a good sign or not, the idea that the two of them had been kept together reminded them of another situation, one they knew intimately and would not wish upon any other.
The upper-level medbay was the smallest of the three aboard the Compass. Tucked away in a little-used corridor, there was a good chance it was minimally guarded. The possibility of a takeover was likely discarded.
Their enemy was arrogant. They did not understand the people they wished to subjugate in the Chiss. Not yet, at least, and neither Eli nor Vah’nya were keen on giving them more of an opportunity to do so. The Chiss were a proud people, but at their core they were warriors. Eli respected them for that, even if their pride had been a little off putting at first. Well, he admitted - only to himself - a lot off putting, honestly.
It didn’t bother him anymore. Pride had its place. The Chiss who betrayed the rest of their people, who were siding with the Grysk had lost sight of where pride ended and arrogance began. They needed to be reminded.
Except, when they entered the medbay, the only sound they could hear was a dull crackle, static.. The two of them exchanged a worried glance at the oddity. Certainly if both Un’hee and Thrawn could be tracked to this location they would be under heavy guard. Definitely not good, Eli thought.
They had taken two steps into the general triage area when every light cut for three seconds before the inlaid lighting strips on the deck plates brightened to a pale tealish glow.
"Main power grid's offline," Eli mouthed to her. Vah’nya’s eyes glowed fiercely in the darkness, and she nodded to him resolutely as they proceeded further into the bay.
A sliver of light that stood out: A pure white light that glowed around the seams of a closed door. It had to be a treatment suite, a series of more private bays at the back of the infirmary. Vah'nya readied her weapon as Eli motioned with the barrel of his blaster. He crouched and, moving as silently as possible, moved up to the closed door. The hydraulics worked despite the overarching power grid being brought offline, so he toggled the door and swung into the doorway, crouched low, prepared to shoot at an enemy hopefully caught unaware.
The cold blast of air from the treatment room hit Eli's face, but no enemies advanced. Aside from the shifting air currents, all was eerily still.
The overhead lights - lights that were considered critical and should not have failed when the ship's main power had been taken offline - flickered then faded, as if the circuits had shorted out. A treatment chair sat just off-center in the space of the room, and in that chair...
Eli rose to his full height. It wasn't much, both the Grysks and the Chiss were taller than him on average. He stepped briskly into the room, motioning with his body for Vah'nya to join him.
"Thrawn." Eli called, keeping his voice even. Everything inside him felt like screaming. He'd expected this. He knew they would find something like this but-
The Chiss's eyes were glazed, half open and barely blinking. Interrogation drugs. Eli knew the signs. Thrawn's head was tilted to the side, unfocused eyes looking at another door to Eli's left and Thrawn's right, the hydraulic mechanism faulted, shuttering to try and open or close with no avail. The door remained a third of the way open, hanging over the threshold by nearly a meter and flexing like a broken valve. The lights flickered on the other side of it. Eli saw the bodies, at least two of them, sprawled across the floor.
"Un'hee," Thrawn said hoarsely. He allowed his head to loll back against the chair's headrest, which in turn let them make eye contact. Red eyes darkened in recognition, then suspicion, though they did not narrow like they usually would. He said nothing, no doubt concerned he was hallucinating.
"I'll get her," Eli said to Thrawn, then turned to Vah'nya. Her gaze was stuck on the malfunctioning door, concern evident in the way her forehead wrinkled. "Vah'nya."
The Navigator blinked, then refocused on Eli.
"Focus," He admonished, gentle but firm. "Hit him with a hypo, then get him unstrapped. Chiss metabolism is-"
"Faster than yours so he should bounce back fast. Right," She said, posture a bit more relaxed than it had been a moment earlier. Then, better, "Okay, Eli."
He graced her with a tight smile, holstering his blaster before removing his belt and all its trappings entirely, weapons included. "Thank you. Try the comms once you get him up. Bridge team should be in position shortly if they haven’t already engaged."
"Eli-" Her voice was cautious, tentative.
"I know," He interrupted, using his shoulder to lift the top half of the door mechanism back into its sheath in the framework. Once it began to feed upwards manually, he used his hands to push it open the rest of the way. "It's okay."
He heard the clack of the binding straps used to keep Thrawn in place clatter against the chair, but tuned it out. His task to get the door open was little more than a few seconds of physical exertion. The smell hit him first, the treatment room’s filters malfunctioning much like the rest of the room’s equipment. There was static from the monitors that should have been monitoring vital signs, a fuzzy drone that seemed impossible to hear for the loudness of the silence.
Two Chiss and a Grysk, all of them male, lay on the floor, eyes open but unseeing in death. Fern-like patterns, black against the blue skin of the Chiss’s faces told the tale of a deadly current that had traversed through their nervous system and vital organs before dispersing amid the durasteel deck plates. Death might have been swift, or it might not. For the Grysk, however, death had likely been instant, wrapped as it was in half bludgeoned metal armor.
Even so, Eli confirmed the three to be dead before approaching a smaller, raised chair. He pitched his voice low, taking in the girl’s condition. “Un’hee,” He breathed.
Her eyes had rolled back into her skull, though her lashes fluttered when he called. Her lips formed intelligible words without sound, and he watched as her fingers twitched. He could not touch her yet. He had made that mistake before, with the Navigator in the next room, who spoke softly to Thrawn. He had to be patient.
“We’re going to get you out of here, Un’hee,” He promised, careful to speak to her from the side, to keep his voice quiet but even, just loud enough to be recognized. “You did well,” He promised. “It’s going to be alright now.”
He began with her legs, snapping the braces that kept them from kicking, then went to her left side and began undoing the thick straps, talking her through each action he took to free her.. When he moved to the right, unfastened the last restraint, and still she hadn’t reacted, he exhaled slowly and braced himself. Sharply, he barked, “Navigator!”
Her back arched like it was a string pulled taut and cut loose, and a gurgling scream left her throat, jagged and sharp. Eli heard a sound in the room behind him, the shuffle of Thrawn and Un’hee moving, the hiss-click of a hypo being injected into his fellow captain’s skin. “Stay there,” He called back to them, before either got any brilliant ideas and tried to intervene. “I’ve got this.”
When the young Navigator slumped back against the chair, Eli took a chance and reached out, smoothing back sweat-soaked hair from her forehead. Her usual braided hairstyle had come undone from thrashing against her restraints. “Un’hee, it’s Eli. I need you to look at me.”
It took a moment for the words to reach her. Her eyes closed and stayed that way for fifteen seconds, her fingers clenching and unclenching, her entire body tensing up. Then, carefully, she peeled one eye open and managed to find him with a tired gaze.
“E-eli?”
“There’s my girl,” He praised. “You did so well.”
She groaned, her eyes falling shut. “I-” She rasped, chest shaking with each breath. “I didn’t mean to-” She began, breathless. “But I was so afraid, and so angry... and I-”
“I know,” He said. “It’s alright.”
“They were going to-”
“I know,” Eli agreed. She let that single eye open again, and he inclined his head. “You know I do,” He pressed, and she did know.
“I can’t stop smelling it,” She admitted guiltily, teeth chattering. She curled in on herself, overwhelmed but pushed past the ability to cry, “Like rotten meat-”
“It’s over,” He said, shushing her. “I’ve got you.” And he did. He knew what she needed.
Quickly, he reached for his chestplate and unsnapped the clasps of the armor, letting it clatter to the floor before he reached for the outer layer of his tunic and ripped the sealing strips apart. The tight, energy absorbing, and thickly weaved cloth would be too oppressive for his objective and had likely taken on some of the stench of the room. His undershirt, however, would smell like the cleanser he used, standard issue aboard the Steadfast, some fresh scent. The outer shell of his tunic landed somewhere behind Un’hee on the floor and then Ivant was untucking his black undershirt from his waistband and yanking it over his head. The soft material ripped easily when he pulled it, and while it wouldn’t be perfect, wrapped widthwise, he could wrap the navigator from the torso up. It would suit their purposes.
This method of Somnia was one they’d only read about. A field technique for when a Navigator needed to be carried or would otherwise be endangered by drifting too far into unawareness. It had been written about as some outdated relic generations upon generations ago. Now, it was the only method that would be of any use to the brave and overtaxed child before him. She would be protected, but she would still retain some measure of control.
“Put your hands up against your heart,” He instructed her. Her lips trembled as she struggled to follow. When she complied, he praised her softly. “Good work. Do you remember what comes next?”
She tipped her head back, but her eyes remained closed, any stimuli too extraneous for her to tolerate in this state. It was enough of an acknowledgement.
Still, he explained, “I’m going to wrap it around your back first, around to the front. That way when you come back to yourself, you won’t be trapped.” He lined up the shirt so that the remaining seam matched her spine, draping over the top half of her face, then brought the side pieces around her like a robe, careful not to pull it too taut over her face, lest she feel suffocated. Once the wrap was basically in place, he gently tucked the ends of each piece of material under her arms at the elbow and twisted the ends into her hands.
“There we go,” Eli said, once confident that the wrapping around the Navigator was secure. “Now you can rest, Navigator,” He soothed, voice holding a sway that could not be denied. “We’ve got it from here.”
He left her in the chair only as long as it took to retrieve his tunic and armor from where he’d discarded it. Redressing quickly, he retrieved the Navigator, taking care to pick her up without jostling her. The girl was dead weight in his arms, limp and unaware. Even so, he could feel the strong, steady beat of her heart with the hand bracing her back. All she needed now was time.
Vah'nya waited impatiently under the guise of checking consoles and cabinets for anything useful. Thrawn remained seated where they had found him. He looked better, but the stim-laced hypo would take some time to eat through whatever contaminants were in his system, regardless of his superior metabolism. Eli took stock of them both as he stepped sideways through the doorway, mindful of Un’hee.
“Comms up?” He asked.
The Senior Navigator shook her head. “Not yet.”
“Doesn’t really matter to us,” Eli admitted. “First order of business is getting out of here before someone realizes something happened to their friends.” He cast his chin in the direction of the door he’d come through.
“They’re dead,” Vah’nya stated. “Did she-?”
“Yeah,” Eli said. Thrawn didn’t question it, leaving him to wonder just how bad off the other Chiss was. “Didn’t surprise me.”
“I sensed more fear than anything,” The Senior Navigator admitted. “It makes sense.”
He couldn’t contest that, so instead he tipped his chin to indicate Un’hee. “Take her? I don’t think she’s harmed, just overwhelmed.”
Vah’nya agreed, and Un’hee didn’t react to the transfer any more than either of them expected. Still, the elder Navigator still took a moment to hold the girl close. Eli’s smile was fond but with a measure of discomfort, he could feel his jaw clenching with the effort.
He turned to Thrawn. “Alright?” Asked Eli, the infliction of his tone stern, requiring an immediate answer.
The Chiss nodded, but barely lifted his head. Eli doubted he was avoiding eye contact on purpose, but wouldn’t that have been something. “The hypo has negated a majority of the effects from my captors’ treatment.”
“Think you can walk?”
Thrawn grunted an affirmative and moved to stand. Eli caught him by the elbows when his knees betrayed him. “Yeah,” Eli said, “Alright.” He sounded more than a little resigned, “Might need a little longer than three minutes to really take the edge off. Since we don’t have that, you’re gonna have to work with me.” In another life, he could almost hear himself adding the honorific to the end. He ducked under Thrawn’s left arm, limp at his side and slung it around his shoulders, Eli’s right arm barring across his lower back and his hand resting on the Chiss’s hip.
Experimentally, they took a few steps forward. Eli made no comment about how much of Thrawn’s weight he was actually supporting, though it was certainly most of it. He motioned for Vah'nya to follow them - a twitch of his fingers from his left hand, still at his side - then let it rest on his blaster, quietly shucking it from its holter at his waist.
“Are you not furious with me?” Thrawn murmured when they’d made it out into an empty corridor. His head hung slightly forward, jaw level with Eli's temple.
Eyes widening and resisting the urge to groan, Eli seethed, “Of course I am. Once we make it out of here, you and I are going to have words.”
It had taken a few more moments of awkward shuffling in silence, but Thrawn must have come back to himself quickly. The Chiss was quick to attempt to extricate himself from Eli's hold. Eli couldn't help but hope that it might have had at least something to do with his simmering anger regarding their interaction in the hangar bay. There was nothing to be done for it now, though. The deck plates rattled ominously and pitched as the deflector shield did its job. Eli held onto Thrawn just a little bit longer, just to be sure.
The comm at his waist crackled. "Shields holding at ninety-two percent." The speaker was familiar.
Eli swapped his weapon for the communication device. "Copy. Are you clear?"
"Affirmative," Came the crisp voice of the team lead that had been assigned to the ship's core. "Encryption on our end is secure." Then, with more personality to their tone, the tech continued, "It was a rush job. Sloppy."
"The crew must have put up more of a fight than they anticipated," Eli speculated. "Any word from the bridge team?"
"Negative."
Eli considered for only a second before responding, "Proceed as planned. Hold the engine and shields. Keep me apprised of any developments."
"Copy, Captain. Standing by." The comm hissed static then went silent. Vah'nya looked at Eli. "Your thoughts?" He asked her.
Thrawn blinked at her, then tilted his head back down and to the left to see Eli in his periphery. He hadn’t tried to pull away again. Eli wondered if he found it odd, these teaching moments where Eli felt like he channeled Thrawn the most. "They're separating sections of the ship with short-range jammers."
"Good. What else?"
"The enemy should still believe that all is well since they’re jamming communications. It wouldn’t make sense for them to fire upon the Compass." Vah'nya looked out one of the many tiny viewports lining the corridor. She saw the Steadfast, polished and sleek against the blackness of space. Her lips thinned as she regarded the vessel.
Eli raised his eyebrows, an indication for her to puzzle it out, to follow the line of reasoning.
"Why would Admiral Ar'alani fire upon us?" She asked, and Eli didn't correct her, which meant he agreed with her speculation as to the source. "If the enemy disabled our shields-"
"She is confirming which faction is at the helm," Thrawn interrupted, sounding more in-control than he had, then rebuked Eli, "There is little time for this," He said.
The human shrugged, biting back the smart reply about how glad he was Thrawn was feeling more like himself. He was glad, but the relief only drew attention to his anger at the moment. And he was angry, he thought. Downright furious. He was absolutely livid at Thrawn for not even allowing him to respond before - well, he may not have been the one to stun Eli, but Eli knew intent when he saw it. Thrawn would have done what he’d had to.
When he spoke, however, he betrayed none of it. "Practical experience is invaluable, pretty sure you were the one who taught me that."
"I hardly put you in danger."
"One word," Eli refuted. "Nightswan."
"That is a name."
“Fine.” Eli didn't rise to Thrawn's bait, while Thrawn had landed himself squarely in Eli's trap. "I'll raise you another: Horatio Figg."
Thrawn inclined his head. When he pulled away again, Eli let him go.
Before they continued, Vah’nya indicated her blaster with a shift of her stance. “Take it, Captain. I cannot carry Un’hee and shoot.”
Thrawn was contemplative. He did not make a move to relieve her of her weapon. “Perhaps I should carry her, Navigator Vah’nya. I am confident in my ability to move, but I do not wish to endanger us with potentially compromised aim.”
It took a moment for Vah’nya to consider it. Eli didn’t blame her, but she sized Thrawn up for several seconds, and found whatever she saw in his gaze to be acceptable. “Don’t jostle her too much,” She warned.
Thrawn eyed Un'hee guardedly, no doubt feeling responsible for her status. "She is too warm for Somnia to be effective," He said.
Normally Somnia required a colder environment. They didn't have that option, but then again, it didn’t matter with this version of it. "I doubt you've utilized this technique before," Vah'nya guessed, keeping her tone polite as she raised her weapon to follow Eli down the dim hallway. "It is not as deep."
"That does not sound as useful as the standard technique."
"She's trained in this method," Eli returned, voice brokering no argument. "But your concern is noted."
"It's almost like Bridger's meditation," Vah'nya admitted, softer in the quiet of the dark corridor. "Perhaps someday we could rely on those practices instead of more complete sensory deprivation," She considered, but this time she most assuredly spoke to Eli.
There was a spark to his eye, something calculating and sharp, as if weighing possibilities. Which, he was. Anything was possible. “I don’t doubt it,” Eli replied.
#thranto#eli vanto#thrawn#eli vanto/thrawn#mitth'raw'nuruodo#un'hee#vah'nya#sw fanfiction#that one time i wrote an almost 5k word chapter and it was ONE SCENE
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Biography
"Deep in my heart:Musica"
San Isidro Labrador Chapel in Lakersfield homes subdivision start with the very small and tiny chapel. The door is just thick plywood that you need to move sideward just to get inside. San Isidro Labrador Chapel serves as my second heart. It molds my young version to become an extrovert person now.
I got interested in joining choir in San Isidro Labrador, where I met my spiritual sisters. Ate Nika, Aj, Abegail, Sheyne. Even though we didn’t always see each other but every time we get a chance to meet it always unforgettable and memorable.
Our friendships start 2014, even though we are still young, carefree and we didn’t know the real and true meaning of friendship we still value and treasure every event in our life.
Years goes by, we already in the stage of busy life because of study. We only see each other during the practice and Saturday in mass but we are incomplete because Abegai, Sheyne and Aj have Saturday class or even though they don’t have a class they are busy doing their school works.
And now, Christmass is coming I can’t wait to have my 16 nights with them for simbang gabi. We even have plans to do caroling for us to celebrate our Christmas party.
Travelogue
"Already Found"
Friends can be found anywhere, everyone have friends but not all have true friends that treat you as family and one. We have so many plans in life. We wanted to travel together, build a rest house in Batangas, have a own mini bus for traveling, and build a business someday.
Maybe time goes by, we met different kind of people, and we build new set of friends. We may not all know what happened in time we are all busy. But I know even we have our own life and friends they are still in my heart as my spiritual sisters, my first ever friends that I will treasure till forever. They are still my bestfriends in all best in this world.
Traveling with your family is one of the best experiences in life. But in this travelogue I want to share my experience with my favorite peoples.
The day before our travel day, we are so very excited. Isn’t our first time to travel together but it is our first time to bond with our Voces Verbi Philippines Family. VVPF consists of different kind of person/members from different places; Batangas, Caloocan, Laguna, and Cavite but despite of differences we are united for purpose it is to serve God.
We met them in front of San Sebastian Parish in Lipa, Batangas. Our first destination is Caysasay Cathedral in Taal to attend mass first.
We also go to the miracle water well that build during Spanish era. Our tour guide said that water well is miraculous because its water can heal simple illness like cough and cold. They also said that you can drink water from well since the resident near Caysasay well get their supply of water every day in that miraculous water well.
Attending Eucharis mass is important for Voces Verbi Philippines (VVP) since we are form from different youth group serving our own churches. And it’s important to thank God first, surrender our day to Him and be thankful every day. Since it’s important and special day for our group it is the must thing to do, thanking God for another gathering. After the mass we travel for almost 1hour heading to resort.
After 1hour travelling we already arrived in Little Bridge Resort in Taal. We spend our afternoon in different water games and activities. We also do jamming and singing. We also surprised our dear padre Bernardo for his birthday.
Saying goodbyes is the difficult part. Even you want to extend the day just to be with them we need to part ways. But I know this is not the last time we met again. Voces Verbi Family helps me a lot to grow spiritually. They help me to find my true calling and that is to serve God and people. I met those people for purpose, even though we have different ages and set of groups, VVPF unite us in one big happy family.
Authobiography
"My Misson: My Purpose"
Dreams help us to strive harder. Help us to set our mind in successful life and future. Dreams motivated us to finish our studies and to get a high grades.
Every time they asked me what is my dream I always said “I want to be an elementary teacher.” When I was a child my sister and I was always playing like we are in school. I was her teacher and she is my student. We used mini black boards, white boards, we also have different colors of chalk and I always pick up a small branch of stick outside.
That dream of mine set me already to become a successful teacher. Someone asked me about what is my dream, And I always said “Teacher, I simply wanted to be a teacher.”
Not until I realized my true and real calling. It all happened summer 2017 when there are missionaries visited our place. They stayed in our chapel for almost 3 weeks. Sisters, Mothers, Brothers, Deacon and Fathers, I met those people in one place. They conducted different activities and services: dawn rosary and 1hour adoration, house visitation, youth and kids’ activities, mass and fogon at night.
After 3 weeks they left, they returned in Batangas. My summer that year becomes productive. That first encountered isn’t last; it followed by second, third and countless times. We visited them in Batangas with youth group. Come and see where I was able to know the story of every sisters and mothers in convent.
According to Father Bernardo “All missionaries are happy people, have a wonderful and contented life.” Because of them I was able to know and experienced the dark side and sad stories of every child that lived in cemetery.
In that almost 3 weeks and whole summer I realized why I wanted to be a teacher. But not just a teacher who teaches how to write and read. I wanted to become a teacher to teach every child how to love unconditionally and teach them to treat everyone what they deserve as human.
I realized that calling of God is the most wonderful and happy dream, serving God with all your heart and passion is another fulfillment and achievements in life.
Facial Recognition
"Importance of Smile"
Rhonna Inghog is known as jolly and Bubly person. I always saw her in school. She loves to do her own look, she's good at makeup and braiding others hair, she always singing even sometimes it’s out of tune and recently she loves to do tiktok.
Rhonna serves as our mood lifter, she always wearing her beautiful smile with dimples out. Her dimples is one of the factor that made her smile more beautiful. When she laugh, she laugh so hard and automatically it made others laugh too. She didn't care what her look and also she didn't bother what others saying about her.
Rhonna is so carefree and unique and when she start to open her lips and make a words you can't resist not to smile nor laugh. Even she wears different kinds of shade of lipstick; dark, nude, pink, red or glossy it doesn't change the way and vibes of her smile. Her lips is captivating even it’s not have a perfect shape like heart or pouty but it can give a smile to others.
I love the way she acts because even she claim to herself that she can’t do that, she can’t make it she’s striving hard to do that thing. She’s so helpful and selfless, I remembered when we are preparing for our graduation picture, she’s helping us to achieve our preferred look even though she don’t have her own makeup.
My favorite part of her face is her lips and eyebrows. She have that beautiful lips especially when she’s smiling and her eyebrows that have perfect shape and look.
Personal Narrative
"Cake Party Pt. 2"
Einstein loves to do cake Party. It all happened because of our adviser Mrs. Gina Belarma. We do surprised for her teachers day and after she blow the candle she dip her finger in the icing and put it in our faces. So the result all of us is have an icing in the face and uniform. All of us smells like a cake, sweet and sticky.
It followed another cake Party, it's during the cheer dance competition. We bought cake not because we assume that we will win, we bought it because we know that we don't have any chance to win in that competition. So we plan to eat the cake after the competition. But unexpected things happened it's so fast and we don't know what really happened that time. One of our classmate lost her cellphone during g the competition, she lend her phone in sound system for our music in performance.
The girl who lost his phone is a daughter of a teacher. So her mother go to our room, and that time out classroom is mess because the cake is scattered in the floor. She asked everyone to look and inspect our bag for checked if the phone of her daughter is in our bag. But she didn't find and see anything especially her daughter cellphone. She wants us all to go in guidance office because of that. She requested us to go in guidance not because our room is full of icing and cake but because the phone of her daughter is missing. She said that cellphone is important because it is given by her father and it's full of important files and pictures.
So our cake Party that should be happy and memorable turned into something that I don't want to remember.
Personal Narrative Reaction
"Life Is Like A Ferris Wheel Ride"
As I read the personal narrative Paula Ross C. Alarcon I felt how hard shes trying to be strong for her Nanay Rosa. They are the only two living in one roof. Just imagine how hard to live with your lolas or lolos, yes it’s hard but I know its fulfilling to take care of your only companion in life.
There are times that God give us challenges to able to be strong. God let us suffer and alone not just because he wants us to suffered it is because he wants to be strong. Because I know when people suffered in difficulties, that is the time where they only remembered that God is exsisting.
And time comes that all that worst and bad memorable will turn into something special for us, it will remind us how strong I am during that time.
Someday when you are already matured you will able to realized that God is so good he let you suffered to become strong
Truly, life is like a ferris wheel ride. Sometimes you are in the highest point where you can do whatever you want, buy want ever you want, eat whatever you want and go to different place you want to go but we all know that life is not perfect sometimes life is so hard that you don’t know what did you do why are you experiencing, that you think you don’t deserved that. And sometimes life is so normal that even you don’t have what others have but still you are still contented because you know that someday God will put me in the place that suffering doesn’t exist.
Literary Journalism
"Working together makes dream work"
Kim Tae-hyung was born on December 30, 1995 in Seo District, Daegu , South Korea. He is 24 years old also known as V. He grew up in Geochang Country. He is the eldest of three children, with younger brother and sister. He's habit is playing saxophone and he loves to do photography and cover artwork. Kim Tae-hyung become a trainee for Big Hit Entertainment for almost 6 years after passing an audition in Daegu.
July 13, 2013 he made his debut as a member of BTS Kpop group. On October 24, V become one of the youngest recipients of the prestigious fifth class Hwagwan order of cultural merit medal, along with the other members of BTS for their role in the spread culture.
In 2016, Tae-hyung made his first acting debut in historical drama "Hwarang: The Poet Warrior Youth"
BTS have 17 albums including Dark & Wild in 2014, Wings in 2016, Love Yourself: Her in 2017, You Never Walk Alone in 2017, Love Yourself: Tear in 2018, Map of the Soul: Persona in 2019, and their recent Map of the Soul: 7
And until now Tae-hyung and his other member becomes ambassador for youth and continued to make music for the youth betterment. They are the most influential kpop group around the world.
Reflective Essay
"020420 Life Changing"
February 04, 2020, i though its going to be simple and normal day. That day is our event in SSG. It's one of our Mandated project. We conduct symposium for Garcianos about Anti-Drug Abuse Education and Campaign. Our choice is the Pulis Imus to be our speaker but unfortunately our availability didn't make it. So our last option is to ask the Childcare near in the School. On the day of our event, our speaker came. I admitted in the first I doubt if they can deliver and be efficient and sufficient speaker because they are also young, age 19 to 25. I'm sure you have that second thought behind your mind.
KID Movement or "Kabataan Iwas Droga Movement" Is a non profit organization who offers free seminars and symposium. Yes I know it's about Anti-Drug Abuse symposium and Yes I know to myself that ever in my life I didn't see nor use any kind of drugs. I didn't know what happened in the first part of the symposium, because I'm assigned to prepare their lunch so obviously I don't have much attention on what are their saying about Drugs Prevention. Not until I finished my tasked, I proceed to hall and I'm surprised because they didn't just talked about what is drugs, what is the bad effects of using drugs and what is the consequences if they caught using drugs. But they are also shared a life story, a true life story that make me shocked.
We should not waste our life because this is just a borrowed life from God. It's a gift given by almighty God. Not just using drugs also in different kind or ways like suicide. In this world not all people have a perfect set of families and friends, not all people are strong, not all people can lift their self from the ground. It's not the reason why you should give up. Sometimes it is the reason why you should stand up. Be strong and start again.
All person have their own purpose. And I realized maybe this is the purpose and reason why Pulis Imus and our schedule didn't make it. KID Movement is the perfect speaker for that symposium. Ate Krizza Kate Yuzon is a pastor. She is the one of the speaker who really have a good way to moved and reached every Garcianos heart. Yes it's about Drugs but it is not just about that topic. It is more knowledgeable because they point out why we should eliminate and remove the thought of using drugs can help everyone who faced hard time dealing in their lives. Just know your purpose and stand, because that is the essence of our life in this world. Knowing our purposes and live with it
Testimonio
" Dog Bite"
It all happened during March 2017, I can't remember what the exact date is but I remembered during that time we are practicing for graduation/moving up. I'm grade 10 that time in Imus National High School-Main that. That day our whole section (10-Einstein) is in Imus complex to attend women's month celebration. We are just selected students. So we are only 3 sections from INHS-Main and also selected students from GEANHS. The celebration ended at around 5Pm. So Me, Lhea and Jona are in rused because we need to buy plants in Lotus that time. We walked complex to lotus. We are walking that time in pavements, many cars are parked at the side of the road so we didn't notice that there is a dog underneath of the car.
It's an askal dog who have so many blood in the face and its saliva is leaking in the ground. At that time we are so surprised and afraid. We are all panicking, we don't know what to do, and we are just shouting for help because the dog is so terrifying and frightening. Jona and I are calming Lhea because she shout so loud that I think made the dog angry so much. She kicked the dog and Lhea fell on the ground, she keep kicking the dog until she get rid of the dog and I left alone, standing in front of the dog. I'm crying that time, because even though I keep repeating and reminding myself that I'm not afraid at dog that I need to keep down. But I can't avoid screaming, yes there are people surrounded at me and keep on telling just walk slowly but Everytime I made a step the dog is starting to bark at me again. The dog is staying underneath the car and I'm just standing and corner behind the wall and the car. Not until the girl pass through infront and the dog come out again and started to bark and bite me. I'm crying so hard not because of the bite but because I'm so afraid. I really don't know what to do. And thanks to the man who helped me to get out. They apply first aid in the part of dog bite. And that time they said that I'm not the only victim of that dog. There is other two from different section and one adult. So the teacher in charged called the ambulance and bring us to MCI Hospital. The injection is more painful than the dog bite. Our parents arrived and wait for us to finish our injections. We got home at past 12AM
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Yesterday’s News open for business in Newcomerstown.
Yesterday’s Information
Meet: Sheri Montana – Proprietor
Opened: Dec. 1
Handle: 140 W. Foremost Road
Cellphone: 740-582-7293
Hours: 1- 6 p.m. Monday via Saturday; Expanded hours beginning shortly
Providers: Distinctive present retailer together with a small line of high-end second-hand gadgets.
Please inform us about your self, your loved ones, and what introduced you to Newcomerstown:
“I’m initially from Detroit, Michigan, so I’m somewhat bit metropolis lady, and now rather a lot nation lady, however I will need to have my metropolis lady conveniences. I moved to Belmont County a number of years in the past from Michigan, and lived in a rural space. I discovered myself having to journey many miles to search out my Dealer’s Joe repair; in addition to Mackinaw fudge, Washington State honey, salon shampoos, and all the opposite merchandise and meals gadgets I missed from Detroit. After making many visits to Amish County, I fell in love with the Tuscarawas County space, and I now reside in Newcomerstown with my son.”
Please inform us why you determined to open a brand new enterprise on Foremost Road in Newcomerstown and what Yesterday’s Information affords to your prospects?
“As a comparatively new resident to the village, I knew I wished to open a store (ideally on Foremost Road) providing the merchandise I like and most popular myself. Folks wish to have that one place with many decisions. My stock consists of greeting playing cards, and distinctive gadgets, in addition to favorites that may allow our village residents to make one cease to Yesterday’s Information, and have the right present for that individual on their present giving checklist, or to spoil your self. I’ve a level in diet, and I’m very a lot into pure merchandise. I even carry ear coning provides, and shortly hope to supply this service to prospects. There are several types of cones accessible relying in your particular want.
“As well as, Yesterday’s Information has Dealer’s Joe gadgets, Salt Water Taffy and fudge from Michigan, unfastened teas, greeting playing cards, birthday items, salon shampoos, soaps, facial masks, important oils, watches, music packing containers, and purses. I additionally carry Ohio State gadgets, ponchos, ladies’s self-defense gadgets, Eddie Bauer for males, night time lights, lavender pillows, home-made crocheted gadgets resembling afghans and scarves, plus pajamas and journals. Used gadgets embrace very high-end clothes, films, books, and so on. The second-hand merchandise is rotated usually, and there’s all the time an ideal choice. I even have a group of vintage clocks, so those who love older cherished items will even discover distinctive treasures at Yesterday’s Information.”
What would you want to focus on for us?
“I had initially deliberate a espresso/sandwich store too, together with the present portion of the enterprise. Resulting from Covid; I’ve put this a part of my new enterprise on maintain for the present time. Nevertheless, it’s nonetheless within the works, and can occur someday in 2021. Too, if there’s any product that my prospects wish to see within the retailer, I shall be pleased to make it part of my stock. I’m thrilled to have opened Yesterday’s Information, and hope everybody will cease in to see what we now have accessible to the encompassing space.”
What would you prefer to see for the way forward for Foremost Road in Newcomerstown?
“I wish to see others open companies on Foremost Road, and achieve success enterprise house owners. I feel the village has a lot to supply, and I’m listening to revitalization of Foremost Road is to start with levels. I’m trying ahead to being part of that motion”, and to assembly locals and guests to Newcomerstown.”
Kristie Wilkin
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By Michael Lanza
Some 200 feet above the shore of Tenaya Lake in Yosemite National Park, on the face of a granite cliff with a name that sets high expectations—Stately Pleasure Dome—I crouch and contort my torso and limbs to squeeze into a slender passageway barely wider than my body. Inside this claustrophobic “chimney,” as this type of formation is known in rock-climbing parlance, I start grunting and panting loudly enough for the sounds of suffering to reach my 17-year-old son, Nate, who’s belaying me at the other end of our rope, below the chimney.
“How’s it look in there?” he calls to me from the relative comfort of his spacious ledge in the warm sunshine.
“Pretty snug,” I call back with feigned calm, beads of sweat streaming off my helmeted head as I scrape, push, and claw my way upward, inch by hard-earned inch, centimeter by blood-letting centimeter.
I’m crawling up through the identifying feature of a climbing route named Hermaphrodite Flake, which literally begins a few steps from where our car sits parked beside Tioga Road, on the narrow strip of flat ground separating Stately Pleasure Dome from Tenaya Lake. Nate and I drove into Yosemite this morning, saw no other climbers on this hugely popular cliff, and decided in that instant to make Hermaphrodite Flake our first route on a planned four-day climbing trip in the park’s Tuolumne Meadows area.
My son, Nate, on Stately Pleasure Dome in Yosemite National Park.
I slither up the chimney behind the giant flake for about 40 feet to reach its exit hole, also just wide enough to push myself through the cramped opening—a scene that must look, to someone watching from the ground far below, like the cliff birthing a fully formed adult human. I then ascend more easily up the edge of the flake to a pair of bolts drilled into the cliff, where I can anchor myself and belay Nate up—getting my turn at listening to him grunt and pant.
“That’s the weirdest pitch I’ve ever climbed,” Nate says as he scrambles up next to me on a foot ledge. He describes how the chimney amplified my grunts and struggles—no doubt bringing stately pleasure to other climbers on the dome.
We linger for a few minutes at our little aerie high above Tenaya Lake’s waters, rippling amid colossal but immobile waves of rock domes and peaks. It’s one of the most breathtaking spots in Yosemite, and on another day, we’d find it difficult to leave this perch. But Nate and I arrived in the park just as this summer’s Ferguson wildfire, outside the park’s eastern boundary, blew up into a sufficiently large conflagration to send smoke billowing across the park. Our view consists of a ghost-like, gray landscape. We rappel to the ground.
I’ve brought Nate to a historical nexus of rock climbing in America to introduce him to multi-pitch, alpine rock climbing and help him expand his nascent lead-climbing skills.
Before the next few days are over, though, I will find myself at a point that every active parent with active, growing kids inevitably faces. And, perhaps just as inevitably for a parent reaching this crossroads in life, its arrival catches me by surprise.
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Nate leading the fourth pitch on Cathedral Peak in Yosemite National Park.
Climbing Cathedral Peak
Early on our second morning in Yosemite, Nate and I stand at the base of the Southeast Buttress of Cathedral Peak, looking up at a daunting wall of gleaming, gray and cream-colored granite riddled with cracks and stacked flakes. It rises about 900 feet to the mountain’s arrowhead of a summit at nearly 11,000 feet above sea level. Vague memories pop into my head from the first time I climbed it, with a friend, when my son was almost two years old. I don’t recall it occurring to me way back then that I might return someday to climb it with him.
Two climbers in their twenties stroll over and say hi. They ask us where we intend to start climbing the Southeast Buttress; they want to avoid bottlenecking with us.
Nate below the Southeast Buttress of Cathedral Peak in Yosemite.
One of them looks at Nate and asks, “How old are you?” Nate responds, “Seventeen,” and the other climber simply says, “Awesome.” But I know what he’s thinking: Here’s this kid about to make one of the most-coveted rock climbs in the country, years younger than most climbers had even conceived that they would one day scale cliffs.
Ascending a wall of rock nearly a thousand feet tall is, I would imagine, a bit like eating an entire cow: You attack it in manageable bites.
We alternate leading pitches, with me starting, and both of us going about as far as our 70-meter rope allows before anchoring to the cliff and belaying the other up. With each pitch, we rise some 200 feet, give or take, watching the Yosemite wilderness slowly expand around us and the horizons creep farther into the distance. More distant mountains, more spires and serrated ridgelines come into view.
A multi-hour climb like this one reveals its magic not in how it challenges you to push yourself to harder levels of difficulty—for both of us, the climbing feels relatively easy, almost casual—but in the uniqueness of finding yourself on a soaring wall in the midst of a wilderness so stirring that it literally ignited an environmental movement.
The summit of Cathedral Peak feels like standing on a cloud.
I’ve had the good fortune of more alpine rock climbs like this one than I can probably remember. But Cathedral Peak is Nate’s first. Reliving the experience through his eyes and words, as he talks about each pitch and points out other cliffs and peaks and dreams aloud of future climbs, kind of feels like stepping back about 30 years.
I lead the last pitch to the top. Fittingly, Cathedral’s Southeast Buttress route culminates not in a bland, broad summit, but a thrilling block of stone maybe the size of a king bed, with sheer drop-offs on all sides. It feels like standing on a cloud. I wait for the moment about 20 minutes later—and six hours after we started climbing—when Nate reaches a spot just below me where we can see each other and he first spies the airy perch of Cathedral’s summit. His facial reaction gifts me with one of the visuals I’ll remember most from this trip.
Nate on the summit of Cathedral Peak, with Eichorn Pinnacle below right.
Two other parties that had reached the top ahead of me have now descended off it, so for a few minutes, Nate and I have the diminutive summit of Cathedral Peak to ourselves. The smoke from the Ferguson Fire, which has moved into the Tuolumne area and retreated almost with the regularity of an ocean tide over the past few days, now mostly hovers southwest of us, choking and obscuring Yosemite Valley but only making our panorama a bit hazy. We turn to scan every horizon, looking out over the other jagged peaks of the Cathedral Range.
Then Nate suggests we have one more item of business to complete today.
Eichorn Pinnacle raises a slender, sheer stone finger about a hundred feet straight up into the air, like a freakish growth on a shoulder of Cathedral Peak. We scramble to the base of it, minutes from Cathedral’s summit. Although evening is approaching, the weather remains perfect and we have plenty of daylight remaining. Nate leads the steep and thrillingly exposed pitch to the tiny apex of Eichorn. He beams when I join him up there and tell him that, in almost 30 years of rock climbing all over the country, that was one of the best easy pitches I’ve ever climbed.
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Nate, two summers ago, on the Lost Arrow Spire at Idaho’s City of Rocks.
Watching a Child Become an Adult
At his age, Nate really knows only the excitement of climbing—the sense of achievement in controlling and channeling one’s natural fears into a focus unlike anything we normally experience. I know that feeling well: It’s like erasing everything from your mind, and it’s powerfully rejuvenating.
At my age, I know all of what he gushes about and more, including climbing’s dark side.
But in Nate, I’ve witnessed a steady trajectory that gives me as much reassurance as is probably possible for a parent whose child dives into activities like rock climbing and whitewater kayaking—where the harsh truth is that not all risk factors lie within our control, and accidents can be catastrophic. In our numerous days of climbing together, especially over the past couple of years, he has plied me for all the information I can offer from almost 30 years of rock climbing. He has read instructional articles and learned all he can from the coaches of his indoor climbing team.
As with any beginner, at first, some of his gear placements were a little shaky. But he focused on improving his skills and has been receptive to my critiques. Most importantly, he’s embraced an ethic of safe, conservative decision-making.
Nate (youngest) and friends climbing six years ago at the City of Rocks.
What astonishes me has been the speed of his progress. Just two to three summers ago, he made his first lead climbs on single-pitch sport routes—clipping bolts, the safest form of lead climbing. Only last summer, he made his first traditional lead climbs, placing his own gear on crack routes of beginner difficulty. Just this past spring, he and I spent several days climbing together at Idaho’s City of Rocks, where he upped his game, leading trad routes of solidly intermediate difficulty.
Maybe that’s one of those common threads linking the parenting experience: We watch them grow physically and emotionally. We try to instill in them the lessons we believe they must absorb by the time they leave home as young adults. And during their teenage years, they achieve a rate of acceleration too fast for us to track—what you might call adolescence escape velocity.
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In some aspects of development, they suddenly rocket past us—they get better than us at something. It’s both a symbolic and a real and quantifiable advance, a representation of a kid’s leap from childhood to adulthood.
And as much as we know it’s not true—and that young person still has much to learn—it can feel like it happened overnight.
Nate and me on the Southeast Buttress of Cathedral Peak in Yosemite.
Climbing Daff Dome’s West Crack
Two pitches up a route named West Crack on Daff Dome, another backcountry cliff in Yosemite’s Tuolumne area, Nate and I stand on painfully tiny footholds of pointy rock where he built a belay anchor after leading the second pitch of this final rock climb of our Yosemite visit. I look up at the third pitch, feeling a bit uneasy in my gut.
Nate had volunteered to lead the first pitch, which he protected well with frequent gear up a long, diagonal crack—a pitch that, to me, felt harder than its guidebook rating when I followed him. At the top, he had said to me, “I was totally in the zone on that entire pitch. Nothing else in my head besides climbing it. I got to the top and looked around and remembered where we are.”
My 17-year-old rookie alpine rock climber had then led the second pitch after I failed at my attempt to lead through the steep and strenuous roof at its start. Nate solved the riddle of the roof partly by finding a critical, somewhat hidden handhold that I’d overlooked. And, again, when I followed, it felt harder to me than I’d expected.
Nate atop Eichorn Pinnacle in Yosemite.
Now, looking up at the third pitch’s thin crack splitting a nearly vertical, smooth face, I’m quietly questioning whether I have the stuff to lead it today.
That’s when the shift occurs in my mind.
There come times on the psychological and emotional journey of parenting when how we see a child takes a hairpin turn. I’m guessing it often happens when the child assumes an adult role, crossing a threshold that signals a 180-degree change in direction in the fundamental terms of the parent-child relationship.
In the dozen or so years since I first tied Nate into a climbing rope, I have been the arbiter of what was safe and appropriate for him (as well as for his sister, two years younger and also an avid climber). I have made the decisions. I have led the harder pitches, all to keep him safe.
Today, I’ve come to realize that old order in our little world has shifted. With a challenging pitch looming above us, an understanding washes over me that I no longer have to shield him. He’s the better person to lead this pitch—today, anyway.
“Do you want to lead this pitch?” I ask Nate. “Because I think you’re on your game today and I’m not.”
I can almost see the eagerness erupt from him as he says: “That’s exactly the kind of pitch I’ve been hoping to lead on this trip.”
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Nate, two years ago, climbing the Mountaineers Route on Mount Whitney.
So he takes the rack of gear and I watch him steadily make his way up the crack, sewing it up with gear. He takes a few rests on the rope, but never falls or looks shaky. When I reach him at the top of it, I blurt out, “Oh my god! I think we just got introduced to a Tuolumne sandbag!”—a term meaning a route that seems significantly harder than its rating. He laughs and says, “Yea, they call that ‘sustained 5.7 fingers?!’”
Then I add, “I knew the day would come when you’d surpass me as a climber. I just didn’t expect that to come this week.”
Humbling? Oh, yea, it is. Recognizing symptoms of my own gradual physical decline naturally breeds a little melancholy. It feels like a sort of Rip Van Winkle experience of falling asleep at age thirty and waking up to find you’re over fifty.
But my strongest reaction is pride—and an understanding that, like so much of raising a kid, moments like this are rare and special, and the period of time we get to enjoy them is fleeting. He’s a year from departing for college and an increasingly busier life. There’s no predicting how many years I’ll continue rock climbing. Always in the back of my mind lurks a sense of time rapidly accelerating. I cling tightly to days like this.
On the vast crown of Daff Dome, which looks like it could fit a couple of football fields, Nate and I search for a fixed rappel anchor to descend. Billowing wildfire smoke rolls in, obscuring even the closest domes. We laughingly trade war stories about the surprising difficulty of West Crack.
I know dangerous. Read “Why I Endanger My Kids in the Wilderness (Even Though It Scares the Sh!t Out of Me).”
A young Nate (rear) and his sister, Alex, rock climbing at Idaho’s City of Rocks.
Nate still has much to learn about climbing to continue practicing it safely, well beyond hard skills like placing gear. There are skills one can only acquire through experience—as the saying goes, we gain good experience through bad experiences. He will encounter pitches so difficult to protect that they scare him and force him to stay calm and make smart judgments. He will have bad days and discover that his progress does not follow a reliably upward trajectory—there are many potholes and frost heaves along that bumpy road. He will experience the temptation to push limits beyond what’s reasonable and prudent for him and his climbing partner; and I can only hope that, when that happens, he does the right thing.
In other words, as in every aspect of his life, as a climber, he will have to continue to mature.
I’m not sure I would have predicted this reaction two decades ago, but there’s nothing bad about seeing your kid get better than you. Besides, he still can’t hike nearly as far as I can in a day, or keep up with me on a bike, or ski bumps with me. I still have that edge—for now (and my slim advantage skiing bumps may disappear by this winter with both of my kids).
But whenever my kids do surpass me physically in all of those activities, it will make me feel nothing more and nothing less than proud and pleased beyond words to see them do that.
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Family Sends The Most Awkward Christmas Cards For 15 Years, And Its Too Funny
If you think you’ve already seen the funniest family Christmas card of the season, think again. Every year since 2003, the Bergeron family has been ringing in the holidays by producing the most clever and hilarious greeting cards we’ve ever seen, and just like the snow outside, they’re showing no signs of stopping.
Mike Bergeron, his wife Laura, and their two daughters known online as ‘Gigi’ and ‘Juju’ have made an annual tradition out of the refreshingly original photoshoots, and each December, they choose a new knee-slapping theme. Whether they draw on pop culture, local culture, or embarrassingly awkward family cards of yore, they always seem to pull it off as a team. Special credit is due, of course, to the JC Penney Portrait Studio, which has seen them all the way from ‘white trash Christmas’ to a full drag ensemble.
Scroll down to take in each joyful edition for yourself, read the stories behind them in Mike Bergeron’s own words, and tell us which ones sent you into a fit of jolly laughter in the comments.
2003, Forty & Fighting It
Our first card! The original concept was “Plugs & Juggs”, but we had to choose this photo because of the priceless facial expressions, even though you can’t see Laura’s overly-augmented rack. Thus, we call this “Forty & Fighting It”. The photographer tried to move the light away from overhead and I had to ask her to shine it directly down on me – she didn’t know how to tell me that it was reflecting off of my head and making me look like I was balding. Finally, I just told her that the balding look was what I was after. She had no idea that we were dressed up in costumes!
2004, We’re Dreaming of a White Trash Xmas
When I went to the JC Penney Portrait Studio to pick-up our cards, they were very busy with the holiday rush and the manager (who was also the cashier) was clearly stressed-out, answering phones, organizing photo sittings, delegating to her employees and systematically trying to work through the line at the cash register. After patiently waiting for about 10 minutes, it was my turn to be helped and she immediately went into sales mode, taking control of the transaction and regurgitating her customer service talk track in a frenzy, multitasking all-the-while, mind you, and not able to really give me her full attention.
Her – “Welcome to JC Penney Portrait Studio, how can I help you today, sir?”
Me – “I’m here to pick-up my Christmas cards.”
Her – “Okay, what is your last name?”
Me – “It’s Bergeron, but I have my receipt right here, if that helps.”
Her – “Okay, thank you. Give me just a moment while I get your order. Sir, it appears they accidentally printed an 8×10, which is usually $19.99, but we’ll let you have it for $5, since it was our mistake.”
Me – “No thanks.”
Her – “Okay…well, I see that your wife is pregnant…I hope you will be coming back to JC Penney to take your baby pictures.”
Me (smiling at the realization that she doesn’t get the joke) – “Actually, she’s not really pregnant…and if she was, I wouldn’t let her drink beer or smoke cigarettes…and, as you can see, I don’t really have a mullet. Its a joke card.”
In the midst of what was utter chaos for her at that moment, she just sort of stared at me in bewilderment as the cashier next to her stopped what he was doing, leaned over to look at the card and said to me with pure and utter excitement, “Dude, that’s awesome!”
Me – “Thanks. Merry Christmas!”
As I took my cards and walked away, the manager stood there in absolute confusion, her brain apparently frozen with the realization that her sales training had failed to prepare her for this situation.
2005, Your Aunt & Uncle Who Live in the Midwest
Being a Bergeron, I have always known that I would eventually lose my hair. We are trained from birth to accept the fact that someday our hair will fall out. At the age of 32, it was apparent to me that my days were numbered and if I wanted to make fun of being bald, then this would likely be my last chance before the joke would become reality. So, on the afternoon of the photo shoot, I had Laura shave the hair off of the top of my head…and I’ve been bald ever since. The thing is, I had to walk around with a bald head for a couple of weeks while the holiday card was processing and shipping, but I didn’t want to give anyone any hints about what the card might be. So, when people would ask me why I suddenly shaved all of the hair off of my head, I would give them some made-up excuse like, “I joined a cult” or, “I’m a racist” or, “Chicks really seem to like that Vin Diesel guy, so I thought I’d give it a shot.” Incidentally, one of the other excuses I would give was, “I’m a competitive swimmer and I wanted to shave some time off my laps.” A few years later, I was bartending and my friend Kristine came in with one of her girlfriends. We chatted a bit and I mixed them up some special shots and then Kristine got up to go to the restroom and her friend says to me, “So, Kristine tells me you’re a swimmer.” Now the question is: How many people are out there who still believe I really joined a cult?
2006, A Very Special Xmas
A couple of years before we started this tradition, my friend, Jeremy, worked during the holidays in a photo studio. If he thought that a family portrait was particularly funny, he would print a copy for himself and put it on display in his living room. They were all awkward and wonderful in their own way, but there was one photo in particular that was so delightfully goofy and uncomfortable that it has always stuck with me. This card is an effort to recreate the magic of that card. I’ll be the first to admit that we fall terribly short, but I think it still manages to bring some joy to the holiday season!
2007, American Gothic Xmas
Overshadowed by controversy, some “purists” have accused us of cheating with this particular card because we Photoshopped it. For those who love it, thanks…we love you, too. For those who feel we cheated…look, we actually dressed-up in costumes and took a photograph for this card (we even bought a pitchfork!). However, since the original work was done with paint on canvas and did not look like a real-life photo, we felt it would be a better choice to manipulate our photo to look like the painting. Since neither Laura nor I are graphic designers, it was quite difficult and time-consuming, but we are very pleased with the way it came out. Anyone who thinks we took the easy way out on this one is simply oblivious to the effort it required. By the way, this was Laura’s departed grandmother’s favorite out of all of our cards. Oh, and for those of you who have suggested that the guy looks nothing like me, just wait until my relatives on my dad’s side view this post and they all chime-in about how I look exactly like my Grandpa Bergeron. In short, suck it, haters!
2008, Merry Krishnas
We got started a little late this year, which meant that when we went to JC Penney to take our picture, there was a one hour wait. We walked through the mall and wound up eating dinner in the food court. I only wish that we had brought flowers.
2009, Los Cholos
This is my personal favorite. Some cards are obviously a joke, but when a card looks as real as this one, it is something special. Again, on this particular year, we weren’t able to take the picture until after Thanksgiving, so the JC Penney photo studio was very busy and we had to wait for an hour to get in. Understandably so, Laura was nervous about walking around the Westminster Mall looking like we did, but I reassured her by saying, “Seriously? Look at us…nobody is going to fuck with us!” I was right…not a single person would even make eye contact with us.
2010, Olin Mills Family Portrait from 1981
May your holiday table be a smorgasbord of cheese balls, fruitcakes, and hams! In many ways, this card best represents what we were trying to achieve from the very beginning. Our concept was inspired by the inherently awkward nature of holiday family photos that has now become so popular in the age of the internet. We wanted to try to capture that awkwardness (in a next level sort of way) and give everyone we know the gift of having a funny card on their fridge that would capture the spirit of the holiday season. When they had people over to their house during the holidays, they could take pleasure in seeing their guests’ reactions upon viewing the card without realizing it was a joke. On a side note, as a bald man who has known his entire life that he would grow up to be bald, it had been a longtime aspiration of mine to sport a combover at some point because they are so fascinating in their ridiculousness! So, this particular card allowed me to not only fulfill a lifelong dream, but also to capture it in all of its glory for the ages.
2011, The Unibrows
I love the idea for this picture, but personally, I think it could’ve been better executed. Don’t get me wrong, we look funny & Gigi really gives the card a whole other dynamic with her incredible cuteness, but I think this concept had the potential to be our best card ever, if we had done it right.
2012, Goth Xmas
This is your legacy, girls…embrace it!
2013, Jazz Hands
Sometimes you catch lightning in a bottle :) Look at Laura…bringing it! Look at Gigi…bringing it! Look at Juju…well, protesting (at least she’s consistent). I am truly blessed.
2014, The Holidays Are Such a Drag
I doubt if anyone at the JC Penney Portrait Studio even thought twice about Laura and the girls, but it was a pretty busy year and we were waiting for about 45 minutes for the photographer to be available, so I am certain that my presence made a lot of people uncomfortable in the studio’s waiting area. I had to hunt high and low for shoes that would fit me (thanks Lane Bryant) and, of course, I shaved my legs, so you can imagine how excited I was that we wound up choosing a shot from the waist up. And, seriously, how friggin’ cute are those boys? If we had given Gigi glasses, I think she would’ve looked an awful lot like Ralphie!
2015, Les Modèles (AKA Fashionistas, AKA Euro Trash)
His shoes – $850, her shoes – $950, spending your holiday with the Bergerons – priceless.
2016, Cussin Jerry nem
A little over a year ago, Gigi started calling me “Cousin Jerry.” It caught on with her little sister and, after a while, I started talking to them as I imagined Cousin Jerry would. Since then, he has become a regular visitor in our household, so it seemed fitting to share him with all of you this holiday season. If y’all are lucky, you may get to see “Creepy Larry” (another Gigi-inspired character) and his family in a future card…we’ll just have to see. Side note…and I feel like I say this every year, but…look at Gigi bringing it!!!
2017, Gingers in Paradise
We went in a slightly different direction this year, which required stepping out of the JCP Portrait Studio and using a photographer (big thanks to Marco Montenegro) at the local beach. This our nod to the ever-so-popular holiday card theme that says “Look at us soaking up the sun’s rays in a beautiful tropical paradise while you’re freezing your nuts off…don’t you wish you were us?”
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Originally Published Here: Family Sends The Most Awkward Christmas Cards For 15 Years, And Its Too Funny
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Family Sends The Most Awkward Christmas Cards For 15 Years, And It’s Too Funny
If you think you’ve already seen the funniest family Christmas card of the season, think again. Every year since 2003, the Bergeron family has been ringing in the holidays by producing the most clever and hilarious greeting cards we’ve ever seen, and just like the snow outside, they’re showing no signs of stopping.
Mike Bergeron, his wife Laura, and their two daughters known online as ‘Gigi’ and ‘Juju’ have made an annual tradition out of the refreshingly original photoshoots, and each December, they choose a new knee-slapping theme. Whether they draw on pop culture, local culture, or embarrassingly awkward family cards of yore, they always seem to pull it off as a team. Special credit is due, of course, to the JC Penney Portrait Studio, which has seen them all the way from ‘white trash Christmas’ to a full drag ensemble.
Scroll down to take in each joyful edition for yourself, read the stories behind them in Mike Bergeron’s own words, and tell us which ones sent you into a fit of jolly laughter in the comments.
2003, Forty & Fighting It
Our first card! The original concept was “Plugs & Juggs”, but we had to choose this photo because of the priceless facial expressions, even though you can’t see Laura’s overly-augmented rack. Thus, we call this “Forty & Fighting It”. The photographer tried to move the light away from overhead and I had to ask her to shine it directly down on me – she didn’t know how to tell me that it was reflecting off of my head and making me look like I was balding. Finally, I just told her that the balding look was what I was after. She had no idea that we were dressed up in costumes!
2004, We’re Dreaming of a White Trash Xmas
When I went to the JC Penney Portrait Studio to pick-up our cards, they were very busy with the holiday rush and the manager (who was also the cashier) was clearly stressed-out, answering phones, organizing photo sittings, delegating to her employees and systematically trying to work through the line at the cash register. After patiently waiting for about 10 minutes, it was my turn to be helped and she immediately went into sales mode, taking control of the transaction and regurgitating her customer service talk track in a frenzy, multitasking all-the-while, mind you, and not able to really give me her full attention.
Her – “Welcome to JC Penney Portrait Studio, how can I help you today, sir?”
Me – “I’m here to pick-up my Christmas cards.”
Her – “Okay, what is your last name?”
Me – “It’s Bergeron, but I have my receipt right here, if that helps.”
Her – “Okay, thank you. Give me just a moment while I get your order. Sir, it appears they accidentally printed an 8×10, which is usually $19.99, but we’ll let you have it for $5, since it was our mistake.”
Me – “No thanks.”
Her – “Okay…well, I see that your wife is pregnant…I hope you will be coming back to JC Penney to take your baby pictures.”
Me (smiling at the realization that she doesn’t get the joke) – “Actually, she’s not really pregnant…and if she was, I wouldn’t let her drink beer or smoke cigarettes…and, as you can see, I don’t really have a mullet. Its a joke card.”
In the midst of what was utter chaos for her at that moment, she just sort of stared at me in bewilderment as the cashier next to her stopped what he was doing, leaned over to look at the card and said to me with pure and utter excitement, “Dude, that’s awesome!”
Me – “Thanks. Merry Christmas!”
As I took my cards and walked away, the manager stood there in absolute confusion, her brain apparently frozen with the realization that her sales training had failed to prepare her for this situation.
2005, Your Aunt & Uncle Who Live in the Midwest
Being a Bergeron, I have always known that I would eventually lose my hair. We are trained from birth to accept the fact that someday our hair will fall out. At the age of 32, it was apparent to me that my days were numbered and if I wanted to make fun of being bald, then this would likely be my last chance before the joke would become reality. So, on the afternoon of the photo shoot, I had Laura shave the hair off of the top of my head…and I’ve been bald ever since. The thing is, I had to walk around with a bald head for a couple of weeks while the holiday card was processing and shipping, but I didn’t want to give anyone any hints about what the card might be. So, when people would ask me why I suddenly shaved all of the hair off of my head, I would give them some made-up excuse like, “I joined a cult” or, “I’m a racist” or, “Chicks really seem to like that Vin Diesel guy, so I thought I’d give it a shot.” Incidentally, one of the other excuses I would give was, “I’m a competitive swimmer and I wanted to shave some time off my laps.” A few years later, I was bartending and my friend Kristine came in with one of her girlfriends. We chatted a bit and I mixed them up some special shots and then Kristine got up to go to the restroom and her friend says to me, “So, Kristine tells me you’re a swimmer.” Now the question is: How many people are out there who still believe I really joined a cult?
2006, A Very Special Xmas
A couple of years before we started this tradition, my friend, Jeremy, worked during the holidays in a photo studio. If he thought that a family portrait was particularly funny, he would print a copy for himself and put it on display in his living room. They were all awkward and wonderful in their own way, but there was one photo in particular that was so delightfully goofy and uncomfortable that it has always stuck with me. This card is an effort to recreate the magic of that card. I’ll be the first to admit that we fall terribly short, but I think it still manages to bring some joy to the holiday season!
2007, American Gothic Xmas
Overshadowed by controversy, some “purists” have accused us of cheating with this particular card because we Photoshopped it. For those who love it, thanks…we love you, too. For those who feel we cheated…look, we actually dressed-up in costumes and took a photograph for this card (we even bought a pitchfork!). However, since the original work was done with paint on canvas and did not look like a real-life photo, we felt it would be a better choice to manipulate our photo to look like the painting. Since neither Laura nor I are graphic designers, it was quite difficult and time-consuming, but we are very pleased with the way it came out. Anyone who thinks we took the easy way out on this one is simply oblivious to the effort it required. By the way, this was Laura’s departed grandmother’s favorite out of all of our cards. Oh, and for those of you who have suggested that the guy looks nothing like me, just wait until my relatives on my dad’s side view this post and they all chime-in about how I look exactly like my Grandpa Bergeron. In short, suck it, haters!
2008, Merry Krishnas
We got started a little late this year, which meant that when we went to JC Penney to take our picture, there was a one hour wait. We walked through the mall and wound up eating dinner in the food court. I only wish that we had brought flowers.
2009, Los Cholos
This is my personal favorite. Some cards are obviously a joke, but when a card looks as real as this one, it is something special. Again, on this particular year, we weren’t able to take the picture until after Thanksgiving, so the JC Penney photo studio was very busy and we had to wait for an hour to get in. Understandably so, Laura was nervous about walking around the Westminster Mall looking like we did, but I reassured her by saying, “Seriously? Look at us…nobody is going to fuck with us!” I was right…not a single person would even make eye contact with us.
2010, Olin Mills Family Portrait from 1981
May your holiday table be a smorgasbord of cheese balls, fruitcakes, and hams! In many ways, this card best represents what we were trying to achieve from the very beginning. Our concept was inspired by the inherently awkward nature of holiday family photos that has now become so popular in the age of the internet. We wanted to try to capture that awkwardness (in a next level sort of way) and give everyone we know the gift of having a funny card on their fridge that would capture the spirit of the holiday season. When they had people over to their house during the holidays, they could take pleasure in seeing their guests’ reactions upon viewing the card without realizing it was a joke. On a side note, as a bald man who has known his entire life that he would grow up to be bald, it had been a longtime aspiration of mine to sport a combover at some point because they are so fascinating in their ridiculousness! So, this particular card allowed me to not only fulfill a lifelong dream, but also to capture it in all of its glory for the ages.
2011, The Unibrows
I love the idea for this picture, but personally, I think it could’ve been better executed. Don’t get me wrong, we look funny & Gigi really gives the card a whole other dynamic with her incredible cuteness, but I think this concept had the potential to be our best card ever, if we had done it right.
2012, Goth Xmas
This is your legacy, girls…embrace it!
2013, Jazz Hands
Sometimes you catch lightning in a bottle Look at Laura…bringing it! Look at Gigi…bringing it! Look at Juju…well, protesting (at least she’s consistent). I am truly blessed.
2014, The Holidays Are Such a Drag
I doubt if anyone at the JC Penney Portrait Studio even thought twice about Laura and the girls, but it was a pretty busy year and we were waiting for about 45 minutes for the photographer to be available, so I am certain that my presence made a lot of people uncomfortable in the studio’s waiting area. I had to hunt high and low for shoes that would fit me (thanks Lane Bryant) and, of course, I shaved my legs, so you can imagine how excited I was that we wound up choosing a shot from the waist up. And, seriously, how friggin’ cute are those boys? If we had given Gigi glasses, I think she would’ve looked an awful lot like Ralphie!
2015, Les Modèles (AKA Fashionistas, AKA Euro Trash)
His shoes – $850, her shoes – $950, spending your holiday with the Bergerons – priceless.
2016, Cussin Jerry nem
A little over a year ago, Gigi started calling me “Cousin Jerry.” It caught on with her little sister and, after a while, I started talking to them as I imagined Cousin Jerry would. Since then, he has become a regular visitor in our household, so it seemed fitting to share him with all of you this holiday season. If y’all are lucky, you may get to see “Creepy Larry” (another Gigi-inspired character) and his family in a future card…we’ll just have to see. Side note…and I feel like I say this every year, but…look at Gigi bringing it!!!
2017, Gingers in Paradise
We went in a slightly different direction this year, which required stepping out of the JCP Portrait Studio and using a photographer (big thanks to Marco Montenegro) at the local beach. This our nod to the ever-so-popular holiday card theme that says “Look at us soaking up the sun’s rays in a beautiful tropical paradise while you’re freezing your nuts off…don’t you wish you were us?”
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By Michael Lanza
Some 200 feet above the shore of Tenaya Lake in Yosemite National Park, on the face of a granite cliff with a name that sets high expectations—Stately Pleasure Dome—I crouch and contort my torso and limbs to squeeze into a slender passageway barely wider than my body. Inside this claustrophobic “chimney,” as this type of formation is known in rock-climbing parlance, I start grunting and panting loudly enough for the sounds of suffering to reach my 17-year-old son, Nate, who’s belaying me at the other end of our rope, below the chimney.
“How’s it look in there?” he calls to me from the relative comfort of his spacious ledge in the warm sunshine.
“Pretty snug,” I call back with feigned calm, beads of sweat streaming off my helmeted head as I scrape, push, and claw my way upward, inch by hard-earned inch, centimeter by blood-letting centimeter.
I’m crawling up through the identifying feature of a climbing route named Hermaphrodite Flake, which literally begins a few steps from where our car sits parked beside Tioga Road, on the narrow strip of flat ground separating Stately Pleasure Dome from Tenaya Lake. Nate and I drove into Yosemite this morning, saw no other climbers on this hugely popular cliff, and decided in that instant to make Hermaphrodite Flake our first route on a planned four-day climbing trip in the park’s Tuolumne Meadows area.
My son, Nate, on Stately Pleasure Dome in Yosemite National Park.
I slither up the chimney behind the giant flake for about 40 feet to reach its exit hole, also just wide enough to push myself through the cramped opening—a scene that must look, to someone watching from the ground far below, like the cliff birthing a fully formed adult human. I then ascend more easily up the edge of the flake to a pair of bolts drilled into the cliff, where I can anchor myself and belay Nate up—getting my turn at listening to him grunt and pant.
“That’s the weirdest pitch I’ve ever climbed,” Nate says as he scrambles up next to me on a foot ledge. He describes how the chimney amplified my grunts and struggles—no doubt bringing stately pleasure to other climbers on the dome.
We linger for a few minutes at our little aerie high above Tenaya Lake’s waters, rippling amid colossal but immobile waves of rock domes and peaks. It’s one of the most breathtaking spots in Yosemite, and on another day, we’d find it difficult to leave this perch. But Nate and I arrived in the park just as this summer’s Ferguson wildfire, outside the park’s eastern boundary, blew up into a sufficiently large conflagration to send smoke billowing across the park. Our view consists of a ghost-like, gray landscape. We rappel to the ground.
I’ve brought Nate to a historical nexus of rock climbing in America to introduce him to multi-pitch, alpine rock climbing and help him expand his nascent lead-climbing skills.
Before the next few days are over, though, I will find myself at a point that every active parent with active, growing kids inevitably faces. And, perhaps just as inevitably for a parent reaching this crossroads in life, its arrival catches me by surprise.
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Nate leading the fourth pitch on Cathedral Peak in Yosemite National Park.
Climbing Cathedral Peak
Early on our second morning in Yosemite, Nate and I stand at the base of the Southeast Buttress of Cathedral Peak, looking up at a daunting wall of gleaming, gray and cream-colored granite riddled with cracks and stacked flakes. It rises about 900 feet to the mountain’s arrowhead of a summit at nearly 11,000 feet above sea level. Vague memories pop into my head from the first time I climbed it, with a friend, when my son was almost two years old. I don’t recall it occurring to me way back then that I might return someday to climb it with him.
Two climbers in their twenties stroll over and say hi. They ask us where we intend to start climbing the Southeast Buttress; they want to avoid bottlenecking with us.
Nate below the Southeast Buttress of Cathedral Peak in Yosemite.
One of them looks at Nate and asks, “How old are you?” Nate responds, “Seventeen,” and the other climber simply says, “Awesome.” But I know what he’s thinking: Here’s this kid about to make one of the most-coveted rock climbs in the country, years younger than most climbers had even conceived that they would one day scale cliffs.
Ascending a wall of rock nearly a thousand feet tall is, I would imagine, a bit like eating an entire cow: You attack it in manageable bites.
We alternate leading pitches, with me starting, and both of us going about as far as our 70-meter rope allows before anchoring to the cliff and belaying the other up. With each pitch, we rise some 200 feet, give or take, watching the Yosemite wilderness slowly expand around us and the horizons creep farther into the distance. More distant mountains, more spires and serrated ridgelines come into view.
A multi-hour climb like this one reveals its magic not in how it challenges you to push yourself to harder levels of difficulty—for both of us, the climbing feels relatively easy, almost casual—but in the uniqueness of finding yourself on a soaring wall in the midst of a wilderness so stirring that it literally ignited an environmental movement.
The summit of Cathedral Peak feels like standing on a cloud.
I’ve had the good fortune of more alpine rock climbs like this one than I can probably remember. But Cathedral Peak is Nate’s first. Reliving the experience through his eyes and words, as he talks about each pitch and points out other cliffs and peaks and dreams aloud of future climbs, kind of feels like stepping back about 30 years.
I lead the last pitch to the top. Fittingly, Cathedral’s Southeast Buttress route culminates not in a bland, broad summit, but a thrilling block of stone maybe the size of a king bed, with sheer drop-offs on all sides. It feels like standing on a cloud. I wait for the moment about 20 minutes later—and six hours after we started climbing—when Nate reaches a spot just below me where we can see each other and he first spies the airy perch of Cathedral’s summit. His facial reaction gifts me with one of the visuals I’ll remember most from this trip.
Nate on the summit of Cathedral Peak, with Eichorn Pinnacle below right.
Two other parties that had reached the top ahead of me have now descended off it, so for a few minutes, Nate and I have the diminutive summit of Cathedral Peak to ourselves. The smoke from the Ferguson Fire, which has moved into the Tuolumne area and retreated almost with the regularity of an ocean tide over the past few days, now mostly hovers southwest of us, choking and obscuring Yosemite Valley but only making our panorama a bit hazy. We turn to scan every horizon, looking out over the other jagged peaks of the Cathedral Range.
Then Nate suggests we have one more item of business to complete today.
Eichorn Pinnacle raises a slender, sheer stone finger about a hundred feet straight up into the air, like a freakish growth on a shoulder of Cathedral Peak. We scramble to the base of it, minutes from Cathedral’s summit. Although evening is approaching, the weather remains perfect and we have plenty of daylight remaining. Nate leads the steep and thrillingly exposed pitch to the tiny apex of Eichorn. He beams when I join him up there and tell him that, in almost 30 years of rock climbing all over the country, that was one of the best easy pitches I’ve ever climbed.
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Nate, two summers ago, on the Lost Arrow Spire at Idaho’s City of Rocks.
Watching a Child Become an Adult
At his age, Nate really knows only the excitement of climbing—the sense of achievement in controlling and channeling one’s natural fears into a focus unlike anything we normally experience. I know that feeling well: It’s like erasing everything from your mind, and it’s powerfully rejuvenating.
At my age, I know all of what he gushes about and more, including climbing’s dark side.
But in Nate, I’ve witnessed a steady trajectory that gives me as much reassurance as is probably possible for a parent whose child dives into activities like rock climbing and whitewater kayaking—where the harsh truth is that not all risk factors lie within our control, and accidents can be catastrophic. In our numerous days of climbing together, especially over the past couple of years, he has plied me for all the information I can offer from almost 30 years of rock climbing. He has read instructional articles and learned all he can from the coaches of his indoor climbing team.
As with any beginner, at first, some of his gear placements were a little shaky. But he focused on improving his skills and has been receptive to my critiques. Most importantly, he’s embraced an ethic of safe, conservative decision-making.
Nate (youngest) and friends climbing six years ago at the City of Rocks.
What astonishes me has been the speed of his progress. Just two to three summers ago, he made his first lead climbs on single-pitch sport routes—clipping bolts, the safest form of lead climbing. Only last summer, he made his first traditional lead climbs, placing his own gear on crack routes of beginner difficulty. Just this past spring, he and I spent several days climbing together at Idaho’s City of Rocks, where he upped his game, leading trad routes of solidly intermediate difficulty.
Maybe that’s one of those common threads linking the parenting experience: We watch them grow physically and emotionally. We try to instill in them the lessons we believe they must absorb by the time they leave home as young adults. And during their teenage years, they achieve a rate of acceleration too fast for us to track—what you might call adolescence escape velocity.
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In some aspects of development, they suddenly rocket past us—they get better than us at something. It’s both a symbolic and a real and quantifiable advance, a representation of a kid’s leap from childhood to adulthood.
And as much as we know it’s not true—and that young person still has much to learn—it can feel like it happened overnight.
Nate and me on the Southeast Buttress of Cathedral Peak in Yosemite.
Climbing Daff Dome’s West Crack
Two pitches up a route named West Crack on Daff Dome, another backcountry cliff in Yosemite’s Tuolumne area, Nate and I stand on painfully tiny footholds of pointy rock where he built a belay anchor after leading the second pitch of this final rock climb of our Yosemite visit. I look up at the third pitch, feeling a bit uneasy in my gut.
Nate had volunteered to lead the first pitch, which he protected well with frequent gear up a long, diagonal crack—a pitch that, to me, felt harder than its guidebook rating when I followed him. At the top, he had said to me, “I was totally in the zone on that entire pitch. Nothing else in my head besides climbing it. I got to the top and looked around and remembered where we are.”
My 17-year-old rookie alpine rock climber had then led the second pitch after I failed at my attempt to lead through the steep and strenuous roof at its start. Nate solved the riddle of the roof partly by finding a critical, somewhat hidden handhold that I’d overlooked. And, again, when I followed, it felt harder to me than I’d expected.
Nate atop Eichorn Pinnacle in Yosemite.
Now, looking up at the third pitch’s thin crack splitting a nearly vertical, smooth face, I’m quietly questioning whether I have the stuff to lead it today.
That’s when the shift occurs in my mind.
There come times on the psychological and emotional journey of parenting when how we see a child takes a hairpin turn. I’m guessing it often happens when the child assumes an adult role, crossing a threshold that signals a 180-degree change in direction in the fundamental terms of the parent-child relationship.
In the dozen or so years since I first tied Nate into a climbing rope, I have been the arbiter of what was safe and appropriate for him (as well as for his sister, two years younger and also an avid climber). I have made the decisions. I have led the harder pitches, all to keep him safe.
Today, I’ve come to realize that old order in our little world has shifted. With a challenging pitch looming above us, an understanding washes over me that I no longer have to shield him. He’s the better person to lead this pitch—today, anyway.
“Do you want to lead this pitch?” I ask Nate. “Because I think you’re on your game today and I’m not.”
I can almost see the eagerness erupt from him as he says: “That’s exactly the kind of pitch I’ve been hoping to lead on this trip.”
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Nate, two years ago, climbing the Mountaineers Route on Mount Whitney.
So he takes the rack of gear and I watch him steadily make his way up the crack, sewing it up with gear. He takes a few rests on the rope, but never falls or looks shaky. When I reach him at the top of it, I blurt out, “Oh my god! I think we just got introduced to a Tuolumne sandbag!”—a term meaning a route that seems significantly harder than its rating. He laughs and says, “Yea, they call that ‘sustained 5.7 fingers?!’”
Then I add, “I knew the day would come when you’d surpass me as a climber. I just didn’t expect that to come this week.”
Humbling? Oh, yea, it is. Recognizing symptoms of my own gradual physical decline naturally breeds a little melancholy. It feels like a sort of Rip Van Winkle experience of falling asleep at age thirty and waking up to find you’re over fifty.
But my strongest reaction is pride—and an understanding that, like so much of raising a kid, moments like this are rare and special, and the period of time we get to enjoy them is fleeting. He’s a year from departing for college and an increasingly busier life. There’s no predicting how many years I’ll continue rock climbing. Always in the back of my mind lurks a sense of time rapidly accelerating. I cling tightly to days like this.
On the vast crown of Daff Dome, which looks like it could fit a couple of football fields, Nate and I search for a fixed rappel anchor to descend. Billowing wildfire smoke rolls in, obscuring even the closest domes. We laughingly trade war stories about the surprising difficulty of West Crack.
I know dangerous. Read “Why I Endanger My Kids in the Wilderness (Even Though It Scares the Sh!t Out of Me).”
A young Nate (rear) and his sister, Alex, rock climbing at Idaho’s City of Rocks.
Nate still has much to learn about climbing to continue practicing it safely, well beyond hard skills like placing gear. There are skills one can only acquire through experience—as the saying goes, we gain good experience through bad experiences. He will encounter pitches so difficult to protect that they scare him and force him to stay calm and make smart judgments. He will have bad days and discover that his progress does not follow a reliably upward trajectory—there are many potholes and frost heaves along that bumpy road. He will experience the temptation to push limits beyond what’s reasonable and prudent for him and his climbing partner; and I can only hope that, when that happens, he does the right thing.
In other words, as in every aspect of his life, as a climber, he will have to continue to mature.
I’m not sure I would have predicted this reaction two decades ago, but there’s nothing bad about seeing your kid get better than you. Besides, he still can’t hike nearly as far as I can in a day, or keep up with me on a bike, or ski bumps with me. I still have that edge—for now (and my slim advantage skiing bumps may disappear by this winter with both of my kids).
But whenever my kids do surpass me physically in all of those activities, it will make me feel nothing more and nothing less than proud and pleased beyond words to see them do that.
Tell me what you think.
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Family Sends The Most Awkward Christmas Cards For 15 Years, And It’s Too Funny
If you think you’ve already seen the funniest family Christmas card of the season, think again. Every year since 2003, the Bergeron family has been ringing in the holidays by producing the most clever and hilarious greeting cards we’ve ever seen, and just like the snow outside, they’re showing no signs of stopping.
Mike Bergeron, his wife Laura, and their two daughters known online as ‘Gigi’ and ‘Juju’ have made an annual tradition out of the refreshingly original photoshoots, and each December, they choose a new knee-slapping theme. Whether they draw on pop culture, local culture, or embarrassingly awkward family cards of yore, they always seem to pull it off as a team. Special credit is due, of course, to the JC Penney Portrait Studio, which has seen them all the way from ‘white trash Christmas’ to a full drag ensemble.
Scroll down to take in each joyful edition for yourself, read the stories behind them in Mike Bergeron’s own words, and tell us which ones sent you into a fit of jolly laughter in the comments.
2003, Forty & Fighting It
Our first card! The original concept was “Plugs & Juggs”, but we had to choose this photo because of the priceless facial expressions, even though you can’t see Laura’s overly-augmented rack. Thus, we call this “Forty & Fighting It”. The photographer tried to move the light away from overhead and I had to ask her to shine it directly down on me – she didn’t know how to tell me that it was reflecting off of my head and making me look like I was balding. Finally, I just told her that the balding look was what I was after. She had no idea that we were dressed up in costumes!
2004, We’re Dreaming of a White Trash Xmas
When I went to the JC Penney Portrait Studio to pick-up our cards, they were very busy with the holiday rush and the manager (who was also the cashier) was clearly stressed-out, answering phones, organizing photo sittings, delegating to her employees and systematically trying to work through the line at the cash register. After patiently waiting for about 10 minutes, it was my turn to be helped and she immediately went into sales mode, taking control of the transaction and regurgitating her customer service talk track in a frenzy, multitasking all-the-while, mind you, and not able to really give me her full attention.
Her – “Welcome to JC Penney Portrait Studio, how can I help you today, sir?”
Me – “I’m here to pick-up my Christmas cards.”
Her – “Okay, what is your last name?”
Me – “It’s Bergeron, but I have my receipt right here, if that helps.”
Her – “Okay, thank you. Give me just a moment while I get your order. Sir, it appears they accidentally printed an 8×10, which is usually $19.99, but we’ll let you have it for $5, since it was our mistake.”
Me – “No thanks.”
Her – “Okay…well, I see that your wife is pregnant…I hope you will be coming back to JC Penney to take your baby pictures.”
Me (smiling at the realization that she doesn’t get the joke) – “Actually, she’s not really pregnant…and if she was, I wouldn’t let her drink beer or smoke cigarettes…and, as you can see, I don’t really have a mullet. Its a joke card.”
In the midst of what was utter chaos for her at that moment, she just sort of stared at me in bewilderment as the cashier next to her stopped what he was doing, leaned over to look at the card and said to me with pure and utter excitement, “Dude, that’s awesome!”
Me – “Thanks. Merry Christmas!”
As I took my cards and walked away, the manager stood there in absolute confusion, her brain apparently frozen with the realization that her sales training had failed to prepare her for this situation.
2005, Your Aunt & Uncle Who Live in the Midwest
Being a Bergeron, I have always known that I would eventually lose my hair. We are trained from birth to accept the fact that someday our hair will fall out. At the age of 32, it was apparent to me that my days were numbered and if I wanted to make fun of being bald, then this would likely be my last chance before the joke would become reality. So, on the afternoon of the photo shoot, I had Laura shave the hair off of the top of my head…and I’ve been bald ever since. The thing is, I had to walk around with a bald head for a couple of weeks while the holiday card was processing and shipping, but I didn’t want to give anyone any hints about what the card might be. So, when people would ask me why I suddenly shaved all of the hair off of my head, I would give them some made-up excuse like, “I joined a cult” or, “I’m a racist” or, “Chicks really seem to like that Vin Diesel guy, so I thought I’d give it a shot.” Incidentally, one of the other excuses I would give was, “I’m a competitive swimmer and I wanted to shave some time off my laps.” A few years later, I was bartending and my friend Kristine came in with one of her girlfriends. We chatted a bit and I mixed them up some special shots and then Kristine got up to go to the restroom and her friend says to me, “So, Kristine tells me you’re a swimmer.” Now the question is: How many people are out there who still believe I really joined a cult?
2006, A Very Special Xmas
A couple of years before we started this tradition, my friend, Jeremy, worked during the holidays in a photo studio. If he thought that a family portrait was particularly funny, he would print a copy for himself and put it on display in his living room. They were all awkward and wonderful in their own way, but there was one photo in particular that was so delightfully goofy and uncomfortable that it has always stuck with me. This card is an effort to recreate the magic of that card. I’ll be the first to admit that we fall terribly short, but I think it still manages to bring some joy to the holiday season!
2007, American Gothic Xmas
Overshadowed by controversy, some “purists” have accused us of cheating with this particular card because we Photoshopped it. For those who love it, thanks…we love you, too. For those who feel we cheated…look, we actually dressed-up in costumes and took a photograph for this card (we even bought a pitchfork!). However, since the original work was done with paint on canvas and did not look like a real-life photo, we felt it would be a better choice to manipulate our photo to look like the painting. Since neither Laura nor I are graphic designers, it was quite difficult and time-consuming, but we are very pleased with the way it came out. Anyone who thinks we took the easy way out on this one is simply oblivious to the effort it required. By the way, this was Laura’s departed grandmother’s favorite out of all of our cards. Oh, and for those of you who have suggested that the guy looks nothing like me, just wait until my relatives on my dad’s side view this post and they all chime-in about how I look exactly like my Grandpa Bergeron. In short, suck it, haters!
2008, Merry Krishnas
We got started a little late this year, which meant that when we went to JC Penney to take our picture, there was a one hour wait. We walked through the mall and wound up eating dinner in the food court. I only wish that we had brought flowers.
2009, Los Cholos
This is my personal favorite. Some cards are obviously a joke, but when a card looks as real as this one, it is something special. Again, on this particular year, we weren’t able to take the picture until after Thanksgiving, so the JC Penney photo studio was very busy and we had to wait for an hour to get in. Understandably so, Laura was nervous about walking around the Westminster Mall looking like we did, but I reassured her by saying, “Seriously? Look at us…nobody is going to fuck with us!” I was right…not a single person would even make eye contact with us.
2010, Olin Mills Family Portrait from 1981
May your holiday table be a smorgasbord of cheese balls, fruitcakes, and hams! In many ways, this card best represents what we were trying to achieve from the very beginning. Our concept was inspired by the inherently awkward nature of holiday family photos that has now become so popular in the age of the internet. We wanted to try to capture that awkwardness (in a next level sort of way) and give everyone we know the gift of having a funny card on their fridge that would capture the spirit of the holiday season. When they had people over to their house during the holidays, they could take pleasure in seeing their guests’ reactions upon viewing the card without realizing it was a joke. On a side note, as a bald man who has known his entire life that he would grow up to be bald, it had been a longtime aspiration of mine to sport a combover at some point because they are so fascinating in their ridiculousness! So, this particular card allowed me to not only fulfill a lifelong dream, but also to capture it in all of its glory for the ages.
2011, The Unibrows
I love the idea for this picture, but personally, I think it could’ve been better executed. Don’t get me wrong, we look funny & Gigi really gives the card a whole other dynamic with her incredible cuteness, but I think this concept had the potential to be our best card ever, if we had done it right.
2012, Goth Xmas
This is your legacy, girls…embrace it!
2013, Jazz Hands
Sometimes you catch lightning in a bottle Look at Laura…bringing it! Look at Gigi…bringing it! Look at Juju…well, protesting (at least she’s consistent). I am truly blessed.
2014, The Holidays Are Such a Drag
I doubt if anyone at the JC Penney Portrait Studio even thought twice about Laura and the girls, but it was a pretty busy year and we were waiting for about 45 minutes for the photographer to be available, so I am certain that my presence made a lot of people uncomfortable in the studio’s waiting area. I had to hunt high and low for shoes that would fit me (thanks Lane Bryant) and, of course, I shaved my legs, so you can imagine how excited I was that we wound up choosing a shot from the waist up. And, seriously, how friggin’ cute are those boys? If we had given Gigi glasses, I think she would’ve looked an awful lot like Ralphie!
2015, Les Modèles (AKA Fashionistas, AKA Euro Trash)
His shoes – $850, her shoes – $950, spending your holiday with the Bergerons – priceless.
2016, Cussin Jerry nem
A little over a year ago, Gigi started calling me “Cousin Jerry.” It caught on with her little sister and, after a while, I started talking to them as I imagined Cousin Jerry would. Since then, he has become a regular visitor in our household, so it seemed fitting to share him with all of you this holiday season. If y’all are lucky, you may get to see “Creepy Larry” (another Gigi-inspired character) and his family in a future card…we’ll just have to see. Side note…and I feel like I say this every year, but…look at Gigi bringing it!!!
2017, Gingers in Paradise
We went in a slightly different direction this year, which required stepping out of the JCP Portrait Studio and using a photographer (big thanks to Marco Montenegro) at the local beach. This our nod to the ever-so-popular holiday card theme that says “Look at us soaking up the sun’s rays in a beautiful tropical paradise while you’re freezing your nuts off…don’t you wish you were us?”
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