Secret 4: Confession Christmas

When I was a sophomore in high school one of my older sisters got brave and told mom the truth about something that happened a long time ago. After that it all started spilling out and all of us were confessing things my mother never knew about (at least where the statute of limitations had passed, anyway, which seems to be roughly 10 years). My mother sat stunned, finally laughed, and said "I see. Okay, as long as we're telling the truth here... what happened to my gold watch with the marquee diamonds in it?" It got very quiet and then my oldest sister, Big-Big, said "oh, yeah... okay, well, [Little-Big] and I were playing pirates... and, uh, we needed a buried treasure...". It turns out that when they were little they had buried the watch in the sand box out back (the sand box on a hill) and that winter the bottom board broke off and the sand box was washed away in the storms. The watch was never found and is still somewhere on the butte despite attempts with a metal detector to locate it.

Ever since that year, whenever we get together at Christmas, we tell mom a few more things. Recently it came out what ACTUALLY caused that hole in my blanket when I was in high school. I was a sophomore and my friends and I had gone to the beach near our house for a bonfire. I got in trouble for smoking because of the small hole in my blanket that I had taken with me and I tried to tell mom that someone else was smoking (since I don't smoke). She didn't believe me and I got in trouble. However, I decided the punishment might be worse for the truth and let it go.

The truth is that this was shortly after the 4th of July. We had a ton of fireworks left over and had been setting them off for hours. We got bored with that and someone, I couldn't say who exactly, had the brilliant idea to throw everything that was left into the bonfire. I had my blanket wrapped around me and moved away, quickly, as flames started shooting out in every direction. Among the stuff thrown in there were bottle rockets that had become random missles and I was hit in the back, burning a hole in my blanket. There might also have been alcohol at that beach but who can be sure? I will say that IF there was, then not having any mixers except Mountain Dew would have been punishment enough for that part of it (seriously have you ever mixed MD with Jim Beam? Shudder...).