Laughing ’til It Hurts

As of late, my heart has been heavy, but instead of sharing a sad story, I will instead share with you a story of a typical shopping trip with me and my mom.

Every year around this time, mom and I like to go shopping together. When I was younger, we would play hooky and make our way around town in the middle of the week accumulating Christmas gifts and spying the year’s decorations up for grabs. But since I’ve moved 200 miles away, we have to squeeze in any kind of shopping trip whenever we can.

Scene: the night before Thanksgiving; perusing the holiday isles of a local retail store.

In (what I think to be) typical mother-daughter fashion, our conversations consisted of a lot of, “Ooooo, look at that! Isn’t that pretty? I’d like to have that one!”

We turn down an aisle continuing our banter when from behind comes a strange sound. We both turn and face a wall of stuffed animals and figurines. You know the ones with PRESS HERE buttons on the bellies and hands that sing and dance on command…? We figured one of them had low batteries and like a smoke detector, started chirping.

We continued looking at the goodies on the other side of the isle and discussing places we would use such decor in our houses when the sound happened again.

We turned back around.

At this point we both wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery sound. We started surveying the toys in a rather scrupulous manor. Then mom took it to the next level; she pressed one of the forbidden buttons and a little white dog wearing a Santa hat with a jingle bell on the end started singing and vibrating, causing the plushy toy to spin in a circle.

A second later a two-tiered snowman one shelf over began to bob up and down to the rhythm of the doggo’s tune, singing it’s own version, but much higher in tone.

Ah-ha! We found the culprit! I picked up the snowman and started to show him to mom. As I held him up, he heard the dog still doing his thing and begin bopping again, this time in my hand.

I don’t know what exactly brought on my moment of insanity, but I became so tickled at everything that was happening that I started hysterically laughing. Well my new friend heard me laughing and decided to join in- again, at a much higher frequency, which made me laugh even harder.

The mini snowman and I had such a giggle fit going on that I wound up on the floor, my mom was in tears, and passers-by were starting to accumulate at either end of the aisle to see what the ruckus was about. We caused a scene, but not the typical fist-fight-over-a-dolly scene the holiday season usually brings. We had strangers smiling eye-wrinkling smiles and laughing big belly laughs at our expense. It.Was.A.Hoot!

Mom helped pick me up off the floor, the crowd dispersed, and I placed my new friend back where I found him; between a twerking penguin and a dabbing snowman (I’m not kidding). I contemplated purchasing my new friend, but thought it best not to in fear of him getting ripped to shreds by my beast of a dog. My little heart couldn’t take watching the inevitable slaughter, especially to something that had brought not just me, but a microscopic fraction of the world’s population such joy.

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And if you’re wondering, yes the featured image is the exact snowman I completely lost my shit to/with. If you’re interested in purchasing him, he is available at Big Lots. He would make a great gift (preferably to someone without pets).