Eleventh Night

Due to…well…life, the Kontis Clan didn’t get to have Christmas until this week. We were all too excited to wait until Three King’s Day (today), so we opened the massive amount of presents (pics to come) and had a lobster feast before playing Cranium so loudly we kept the neighbors up (payback for their annoying dog).

Once upon a time, back in Ye Olden Heyday of The Kontis Sisters’ reign, Soteria and I would stage impromptu variety shows. If YouTube had been around then, we’d be seriously famous right now. As it is, there are zero home movies of us as children. We couldn’t afford a video camera. Heck, my parents still don’t even have call waiting.

We performed as the spirit moved us for whomever would stand still long enough to watch. For my grandmother’s ladies’ club, for my friends’ parents, and for the family almost every single Christmas. We eventually roped in the neighbor kids to put on the greatest Christmas Eve pageants ever. (They were Cajun, so Christmas Eve dinner there was always fried oyster po’boys. God, I miss those.) We performed skits, sang songs, and one year I wrote a story that left no dry eye in the room.

And then we all moved away and the performances just stopped. That is…until last night.

In our house growing up, there were a lot of rules. Soteria and I would joke that Mom’s favorite saying (next to “If I find it, can I smack you?”) was: “There’s a new rule.” There’s a famous story of how we groaned once and Mom said, “Oh, come on. We don’t have that many rules.” Soteria and I went upstairs and came down hours later with no less than 186 rules.

Both of us wish Mom and Dad had kept that list. We’d give just about anything to have it now. Every so often one of us will remember a rule, and we’ll call the other one to remind her and have a great laugh about it. We were having a conversation very much like this a few days ago, when Soteria suggested rewriting “The Twelve Days of Christmas” with a bunch of the rules we had as kids. An hour–and much giggling–later, we had our song.

Here it is, performed for our Eleventh Night Greek Christmas, with no rehearsal whatsoever. I hope you find it as amusing as we did.

Did you have any strange/great rules as kids?