Lisbeth: if you go to the KING-fm Website king.org, you should be able to find instructions for listening online. I think it's also listed as one of the classical choices in the Windows Media radio. (That's how I listen to it). It's actually a Seattle station, far, far away from me, but it's good and I like the on-air people and it's classical music.

I have to tell you about the party I went to last night.

This was the most raucous and wild party I've been to this season.

And it was my church's women's group.

Yes, hahahahaha. A lot of people, when you say "church ladies Christmas party," they either think of the Dana Carvey character or else they think of ladies standing around, singing hymns when they're not making up fruit baskets for the poor.

Well, we did collect a lot of items - both personal care items and stuff like underwear and toys - to send to the local women's shelter (where abused women who finally try to break free from the abuser go). But we also ate a lot, and had a white elephant gift exchange. And that was the source of the raucousness.

Now, you must understand, that most of the ladies interpret "white elephant" to be either a "nice" regift - something you were given that doesn't fit in with your house or something you couldn't use. Or, like me, it's a random nice item bought on a good sale for the "gift shelf" (you DO have a "gift shelf," don't you?).

However, a few try to outdo themselves with bizarre random stuff OR there are a few "circulating" items that show up every year or every other year (a glass jar with a couple of fossilized candy canes in it) and are wrapped as deviously as possible.

We also play it as the so-called "dirty Santa" game, where you draw numbers and when your number comes up, you can either choose and unwrap a gift, or you can steal the already-unwrapped gift of someone else.

There was some "stealing" and that got things started. I shocked people because "nice" me stole a set of fancy hand towels - well, they were nice, they had cardinals on them, I had a high number and by the time it got 'round to me the packages left didn't look very promising. (But someone with a higher number stole them from me. So I wound up with a big fancy Christmas ornament, which is nice, except it's about 10 times too big for my little tree).

But the real piece de resistance was one gift in particular. And, I think, the person who got it.

it's kind of hard to explain. It was a Christmas tree ornament, one of those clip kind, and it was in the shape of an anthurium flower (If you don't know what one is, go click on the link and look at the picture. I'll wait. You really need to know what one looks like).


Okay? See, they're not like typical flowers, they have a spathe (the big red part) and a spadex (the part where the reproductive parts are located). You can see on the picture that the spadex is somewhat....shaft-shaped, if you get my drift. And on a real anthurium, it kind of droops, like in the picture.

Well, on this ornament, the spadex was...ahem....erect. And it was painted suggestively enough that lack of total correspondence with the detailed anatomical features of what it looked like could be ignored....

Folks, the tree ornament looked like it had a winky.

I will say, it's an experience to see a group of church ladies, some of them elders, some of them Sunday school teachers, some of them choir members, SCREAMING with laughter over that tree ornament. I mean, I thought it was sort of funny, but I'm still a little bit of a prude that way (never having had children...I have a friend who once said "after you've diapered kids, you lose all that remains of your sense of modesty"). But what was really funny was seeing the other people's reactions...part of it was the woman who got it, she was showing it off by very delicately pointing out the salient features of the ornament...again and again.

there were also the predictable jokes about whether it would "stand up well" on the tree and such.

one of the ladies took a picture of her showing off the ornament's anatomy. I leaned over and said to the person next to me "That's a photo that will never show up on the church bulletin board!"

the main funny part of it was how the women were reacting... it was rather unexpected to me. (Had I gotten the ornament? I probably wouldn't have even made the connection. I'm kind of stupid-innocent that way.)

at one point the hostess' husband came in from his workshop and said "I thought my grandchildren were here"

We had to get up and sing a couple verses of "Silent Night" at the end to calm ourselves back down.

Maybe it's not that funny to you - maybe it was a "you had to be there" moment, but it was just one of those bizarre things: here's this unintentionally racy Christmas tree ornament showing up in a group of church ladies, and instead of trying to suppress or ignore it, they are just screaming with laughter and stomping their feet on the floor over it.

And I was thinking about it, later on that evening: one of the older members (whom I had not known; she had been a shut-in since before I moved here) had passed away over the weekend, and her funeral had been earlier in the day. And a number of the ladies had been there. And there was something almost Boccaccio-esque about the fact that even though they had buried someone they knew well earlier that day, they could still totally get into laughing over the ribald comparisons being made about the structure of a Christmas tree ornament.