Gee, I musta been 5 or 6 years old... it was a long time ago. It was the year that I started to think that Santa might not be real. But, it was early in the age of plastics. Even I could tell that in the few short years that I’d been ripping Christmas wrap, they were starting to do some really cool stuff with plastics. Maybe I was 7... one of those early years.
My older sister was sitting at the kitchen table while we crouched behind the boxes in the living room. We’d laid in a good bunker to protect and camouflage our position while maintaining a strategic firing position on either my sister, or Mom and Dad if they ever came out of the bedroom (gee, duh; today I just figured out what they were doing. Merry Christmas baby!).
Their door never moved so therefore, the command came down to attain a final aim on my sister with the 3” cannon that fired a plastic ball hard enough that we could knock whole branches off the tree over in the corner. Since Dad had said that we weren’t to fire on the tree anymore, and didn’t listed any other off limit targets, we figured we still had plenty more to choose from. My sister didn’t think that way though, but she never heard what we were planning. She was engrossed in whatever girlie thing she got for Christmas.
“Fire!”, came the command from the top.
I pulled the firing cord and sent the black cannonball perfectly into the middle of my sister’s face. Blood spurted instantly from her and started flooding the kitchen table. Before my brother and I could move into to interrogate our prisoner, Mom and Dad came flying out the bedroom.
I don’t know why Dad was so mad at us; he’s the one that brought the damn thing into the house; what the hell did he think we were gonna do with it? I can still remember that whole scene. Betcha a quarter my sister remembers it too; Dad probably remembered it, or maybe he remembered the dental bills from capping and crowning my sister’s front tooth that year.
Those were the days; consumer protection laws were lax and there were just gobs of fun stuff for Christmas.