Here's mine

Christmastime 1990 or 1991: I'm with my parents, on the hunt for a christmas tree. We go to the Gless farm on Van Buren, back when it was still there. The trees were all kinda iffy, with dead spots or entirely dead, etc. There was another farm down on Cajalco and Wood Road, so we went there. It was a pretty big place, and they ended up having a tree that looked pretty good. My dad sent me up to the entrance to get a saw, so we could cut it down. When I got to the gate, it was locked. What the hell?

I hop the gate, and the only vehicle in sight is my dad's truck. There are no people around or anything. Yet, amazingly, the saws were still hanging on hooks where anyone could get to them. Seems unsafe, looking back on it. Anyway, I grab one and hop the fence again, and go back to my dad. I tell him that the people left, and that we were locked in. He says that it's their mistake, and so we get a free tree. He starts cutting it down, and I'm wondering how these people going home makes it okay for us to steal a tree. A few minutes later we've backed the truck up to the gate, tossed the tree over the gate, and gone on our merry way.

We get to the house and break out the christmas tree stand. This is back before they had the nifty "stick the tree in and click it around on this rotating ball thing" stands that they do now. This was the old ghetto metal kind of stand, where there's four screws that hold the tree in place and you tighten or loosen them to make it lean one way or the other. Every year, this was a hassle. You gotta cut the tip off the bottom so it's fresh and free of sap when you stick in on the stand. Then when you get it in the stand, you have to crawl under it and dick with the stupid screws for 5000 years just to make it stand right. And that's just to get it in the house and looking nice, that's not even counting the time it takes to decorate it later or anything.

So the tree is on the stand, and we move the couches in the front room. He hoses the tree off (to get spiderwebs and dust off it, etc), and once it's mostly dry, he brings it in. It leans to one side. Tighten a screw. Loosen a screw. Tighten all the screws. Loosen these two, but tighten these other two. No, wait. Loosen a third one. Tighten this one and don't move the other ones. You have to make it work with a minimal amount of twisting, or the tree's trunk gets all gnarled and stripped, so the screws have nothing to grip.

See, the problem with most trees standing up straight lies in the overall shape of the trunk. If you get a straight one, all is well. If you get one that slants at any point, you're fucked. It's hard to make it go in a straight line. Well, the bottom of this tree's trunk was like an S. It was all twisted and the screws were busting into the wood at weird places, and it just was not cooperating. So my dad messes with the tree for like two hours. We'd get it close, but it wouldn't be totally straight. Then it would look perfect at one angle, but way off at another. Finally, after much manipulation, it is perfect. It's exactly straight and exactly vertical and we all stand back and smile at the victory over gravity.

Then it slowly leans over, not unlike the Tower of Pisa, or Shinra No. 26. There was just this long silence as it tilted and came to rest at about a 75-degree angle. If you've ever seen my dad, you know he's like me, just bigger and more volatile. So in my peripheral vision, I can see his shoulders tense up. He charges across the room, reaches into the tree and grabs the trunk, yells "GOD DAMN IIIIIIITTTTT!", while shaking the living shit out of it... kind of like a mixture between how it looks when Homer Simpson strangles Bart, and some heavy metal guy headbanging. He positively fucked that tree's shit up. The needles flew all over the goddamn place... and the stand somehow managed to cling for dear life and not fall off.

But he wasn't done unleashing the pure fury of 10,000 hells on this poor tree. He flings the front door open while holding the tree up by just his right hand, and the whole time he's yelling and going ARGH and shit. My mom goes, "Michael, the neighbors will hear you...", kind of worried at how angry he was at the tree. He lifts the tree up over his shoulder like a javelin and goes, "FUCK THE NEIGHBORS, THEY DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH ANYWAY!" and throws the tree out into the front yard like the most epic long bomb in football history. That tree was heavy as shit, too. I don't know how he did it. I guess that's the power of adrenaline. At least I know if a house ever falls on me, he will be able to lift it.

So when he did that, I immediately started howling with violent laughter. Not only because the whole day was just so bizarrely random, but because that outburst of his was fucking hilarious. He does a 180 like a Resident Evil character and looks at me and goes, "IT'S NOT FUCKING FUNNY! ARGHSKJGKLUJDZ", which only made me laugh even harder. I was actually on the floor holding my stomach. So great. Then about three seconds later, he started laughing too. A little while later, we went to Target and got a tree that was pre-cut, and it stood up like a champion, and then christmas went on normally for the rest of the season.

For most people, their favorite christmas stories involve opening some gift they really really wanted or having some big surprise happen, or a christmas miracle, etc. Not me. My family stealing a christmas tree and then having insane bad karma follow that, which taught me that even angryass shit is funny, and also taught me that you don't steal shit, is probably my top story. I only wish I had it on video. It would win every home video contest ever.