First shotgun

My six-week-old son received his first shotgun today.  It's moments like these when I think, "Only in Minnesota."

And it's moments like these that remind me I'm not celebrating the holidays with the Partenheimers.  Let's just say us suburban Philadelphia folk are not hunters.

While we waited for our Thanksgiving feast to digest before enjoying some pie, Chris's Uncle Clyde gathered the family, shut the football game off and commanded everyone's attention for his presentation of gifts to his newest nephew.  The theme?  Soren's first hunting trip with Grandpa Dan. 

And so Clyde started to pull items out of an over-sized camouflage-bedecked Rubbermaid bin and tell the story of Soren's first hunting trip to the family's cabin on Mule Lake in northern Minnesota.  There were the Crayon-shaped thermoses to hold hot chocolate and chicken soup, the rubber duckies Clyde tossed in the air and shot theatrically with the toy shotgun and, to my chagrin, a lot of camouflage clothing.  Just when we thought Clyde was finished with his show, he carted into the living room a 4'x4' map of the cabin's hunting land he had constructed from plywood and 1x4s, and then proceeded to narrate the story of the first deer hunt with action figures and a toy deer. 

It was better than any football game halftime show.

With no kids of his own, Clyde shared his interests of hunting, fishing and Cribbage with his six nieces and nephews.  Now that those nieces and nephews are having kids of their own, he's taking great joy in welcoming the newest great-nieces and nephews to the family with his gifts.  I thought he was just making a fuss over Oliver's arrival, since he was the first grandchild in the family and he carried on the Oliver family name, well, at least through a first name.  Nonetheless, I don't think Clyde could have been any more thrilled with the name choice than if we had named our first-born son Clyde. So Clyde christened Oliver's arrival with a fishing and Oliver theme, in which Clyde presented him with every single item he could find that had Oliver printed on it, and in a nod to Chris's cousins who grew up on a farm, three toy replica Oliver tractors.

Then last Thanksgiving Cousin Sophia received her own bin of themed gifts, and by this summer, months away still from Soren's birth, Clyde was working on his next future niece or nephew's gift.  Apparently not knowing the gender was driving not just Nan crazy, but her brother as well.  Even though I knew I was having a boy, I cringed at the thought of pink fishing rods and princess-themed sleeping bags.  Think it crazy, but I wouldn't be surprised if Fleet Farm sells pink hunting rifles.

From my shock that my newborn had received a (toy) shotgun to the groans from family members that Clyde needed to move his presentation along, this is what family memories are made of.  Only time will tell whether Soren shows an interest in hunting, but if he ends up taking that first trip with Dad, Grandpa Dan and his Great Uncle Clyde, I picture one of the adults sitting in a deer stand in the cold dawn hours and breaking the silence with a chuckle at the memory of Uncle Clyde traipsing his action figures and toy deer back and forth across a plywood map while a once newborn Soren, oblivious to the show, slept soundly in mom's arms with a bright orange cap placed delicately on his head.