... where family is the source of humor!

Miss Behaved Christmas Scenes |2| by Catharine Bramkamp

"Miss Behaved" Catharine strikes again! With a tongue firmly planted in cheek she shares another, but humorous, look at the holidays. Especially the once-a-year holiday themed 'newsletters'; which, for some of us, is the only time we hear from that particular family member.

Dear Miss Behaved:
What happened to my favorite part of Christmas, the family letter? There is nothing more thrilling than to learn the second ex-wife of my best friend's ex-husband held a family reunion at Sturgis South Dakota and I miss learning that kind of valuable information. When did those letters die out?

Signed, Nothing to Read During the Holidays

Dear Nothing,
The letters didn't die out, they have evolved. We have abandoned the once favorite practice of writing impossibly cheerful letters with slightly exaggerated family news to our friends, and replacing them with a web sites of enormous proportions and narcissism.

It is a practice that can only be admired by the truly Miss Behaved, and we do.

So in the Family Christmas Letter Contest, the ultimate Miss Behaved Christmas letter is now nothing more than a tiny business card sent in the big envelope with the two lines we now love to hear. Merry Christmas, visit our web site at www.geocities.com/family/smith/Nancy& Tony_145/

We recently received a report from a Miss Behaved reader on the above web site. She visited it because the idea of the family newsletter on line was too compelling to ignore, she wanted to make sure that the tone of the web site was in keeping with the most traditional family newsletters, and they may have some cool graphics she could borrow.

On the site she found: 14 pictures of Tony Jr. in his various little league poses; a film clip of the birth of baby number four; audio of the school play where Misty wasn't the star but held an important supporting part that required three full lines, not counting the gasps and nods that she did so well (Click here for video clips of the three parts where she speaks); there was a rotating graphic of how the family finances have increased every month but in stead of a minute by minute revision in negative numbers, the graph has been replaced with a sanctimonious comment about how money doesn't buy happiness.

Fill out the questions and compare your income against ours to see how you stack up.

Click here to see how we're spending the inheritance Nancy's family just left us just as our stock crashed. We're so lucky! How about you? We're considering a BMW Z-3 and jet skis, or a RV and a Jeep. Log in and tell us which would be best.

Click here to read from Nancy's current novel in progress, remember it's in the draft form so when you fill out the enclosed evaluation be kind. Here's a video clip of the family serving soup at the local homeless shelter in honor of Flag Day. Click here for testimonials by the people we helped by serving soup. We were there for a whole hour except for Tony who had to leave after ten minutes for a meeting back at work.

Our intrepid Miss Behaved web explorer even visited the links to the children's web sites. Tony Jr.'s site played four minutes of Brittney Spears from video clips he's borrowed off of other sites. Misty's site was composed entirely of a collage of In Sync, Back Street Boys and 98 degrees, all of whom look alike to the untrained eye.

There was a picture of the family standing in line for Harry Potter captioned with "Doesn't Tony Jr. look cute as Harry? Misty wanted to dress up as Hermione but we couldn't get the hair right. We were the first family in our neighbor hood to see the new blockbuster movie."

At the bottom of the web page was an invitation to communicate. "If you have anything to say that matches up with our superb technological lives, you can e-mail the web master, who is Todd, our ten year old. Or call on any number of our cell phones, the numbers listed below."

Any one who has ever wandered onto the Yahoo web site devoted to the adventures of Sammy the Sloth, and feels compelled to not only improve, but to create their own site for fun and possibly profit. Miss Behaved people understand. But be warned that merely creating a web site will not count towards your fifteen minutes of fame, and it doesn't count as information we need.

What a Miss Behaved web site visitor and holiday newsletter recipient really wants to know is how do you feel about me?

Humorous Book Recommendations:             [ view all ]
Being Miss Behaved: Humorous Essays For The Politically Incorrect
[Catharine Bramkamp; 201 pages]
After enjoying excerpts, such as Flour Babies and Dressing Like an 8th Grader, shared here at Humor Is Relative - why not order the book to read more! Catharine will have you laughing and shaking your head with her Miss Behaved essays. Can you relate?

The beauty of 'spacing' children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with older ones -- which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.
-- Sydney J. Harris

Humor Is Relative
WebSite Primer
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Humor Is Relative thanks Cay Dickson, from Houston Chronicle, for the compliment!

Any child can tell you that the sole purpose of a middle name is so he can tell when he's really in trouble.
-- Dennis Fakes Points with Punch

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The most important a father can do for his children is to love their mother. -- Theodore Hesburgh

I never see any home cooking. All I get is fancy stuff.
--Duke of Edinburgh