Growing up, Christmas time in the Froemming household was always interesting. We had a good stretch of years where Dec. 24 always guaranteed some relative or another would make some sort of scene.
I once shared this story in the Worthington Daily Globe, but I don’t think I shared it for my Off The Record readers and surely have not shared it with the Bemidji readers, so here it goes.
It was the late 80s, and I was about 8 or 9 years old. My uncle had bought me three movies for Christmas. In my young eyes, he was acting kind of weird and smelled like cough syrup. As my father explained to me the next day, “Your uncle was blitzed. We lost him in the Media Play parking lot for an hour.”
Well, the three films he bought me were “Free Willy,” “Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey” and, I’m not lying, “Silence of the Lambs.” Of course, being 8, owning an R rated movie was pretty cool. Unfortunately, my parents thought otherwise.
“How could you give an 8-year-old ‘Silence of the Lambs’ for Christmas?” my dad barked at my uncle.
“I thought it was about animals,” My uncle replied.
My uncle is a strange guy.
