I have to relate the story of when we were all kids. We were at Grandpa Franklin's house in Des Moines, Iowa for Christmas. (Yeah, you probably didn't know that Barney actually comes from the Franklin side of the family.) He is the son of the late "Bub" Franklin of Bub's Appliance Repair fame, and was raised with eight siblings in the painfully stark, barren burg of Indianola, just outside of Des Moines.

Anyway, we had just completed a long drive from Kansas City to Des Moines, us kids piled out of the car at Grandpa Franklin's house, and the next thing I know I'm being half pulled, half dragged by Cousin Barney to a secret hiding place under the big back porch. That spring, Barney had secured a big glass jug of Grandpa's cider from the shed and had stashed it under the porch for just such an occasion. Needless to say, that cider had a good "head of steam" by that December afternoon when we slid under the rickety old steps.

"Take a pull on this," said Barney, hoisting the jug of cloudy brown liquid with pride.

"You first," I said, half hoping he would somehow chugalug the entire bottle so I wouldn't have to drink any.

At that point Barney displayed the rare drinking style that would later become his hallmark, lifting jug to lips and tipping his head back until the cider jug was pointing straight to the sky. Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug. The jug itself seemed to be belching from relief at dispensing the vile liquid within its containment.

"Okay, now you," as the nasty container was once again thrust into my hands.

Big sigh. "Sure. I thought you were going to drink it all to yourself," I exclaimed with false bravado. "Didn't want you to hog it all."

And I inhaled deeply, held my breath so as not to breathe the noxious fumes wafting out from the jug top, and took a big swig. Hmm. Little bite but with a faint essence of apple. Nice finish. Piquant, almost precocious blush of pine. Spppppssssssspspsp. I spit that poison liquid from my mouth as though I had held my breath to make it more aerosol, drenching Barney and the entire underside of the porch in one instant discharge.

"Heyyyyyy!" yelled Barney as I coughed and choked and fought for the few clean molecules of air that remained in the close confines under the porch. "You're just a wimp. Can't hold your liquor. What a puny."

I've been called worse.

Barney cuffed me behind my head with a hard palm crack and then wiped off the bottle top with his shirt (yeah, like that dirty old shirt he was wearing was going to make it clean). "Let ol' Barney show you how it's done, cuzzin." Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug.

And, as I had secretly hoped from the beginning, Barney drained that jug of fermented cider right before my amazed eyes.

"Buuurrrrrrpppppppp!" That one must have curled his toes. And the next thing I knew Barney was singing or what he must have thought was a reasonable facsimile thereof.

"Hey, you boys get out from under there," boomed Uncle Bub's voice. Despite his rather small size, Uncle Bub was a big pain in the you-know-where when it came to discipline, so we immediately scrambled out from under the porch and shuffled into the house.

Once inside we eventually made our way into the living room where the entire rest of the gathered family was sitting, chattering like a tree full of magpies. The little kids were seated in the center of the floor where the adults could keep an eye on them. The older kids ran in and out of the room as if to demonstrate that ADD was just a name away from explaining their behavior. And there stood Barney and I, smelling of stinky old hard cider, and me praying that no one was downwind of my breath.

Now, you have to see the room to fully understand what happened next. Right in the middle of one wall was a big Christmas tree that Grandpa Franklin had cut down up in the hills just outside of town. Grandma had been ailing for a few years and just couldn't get those arthritic limbs to work with him much, so except for the occasional pinecone, the tree was bare. Grandpa apparently figured he had done his job by stalking the elusive tree, felling it with one (or two, or three) mighty swings of his great axe. Anything beyond hauling the prize home and erecting it in the living room was well beyond "man's work."

Just to the left of the tree was a window with those little wood slats in it that made you feel like you were in a small cottage in the woods. Another window just like it, but a little bit bigger, was stuck in the middle of the adjacent wall. There was a dark little upright piano on the opposite wall from the tree, the requisite small, spindly legged wooden tables with crocheted doilies to soak up errant coffee from sloppy cups, and two really old pictures on the walls in musty old gold frames. I think one of them might have been Whistler's mother, but the origins and name of other one were definitely obscured by society's indifference. A couple of yellowed old floor lamps with fringe lampshades should complete the scene for you. Oh yeah, and a big rope rug that looked like it was made from quilts that had long since gone south for the winter. Grandpa always told us that the furniture in this room came with the family when they rolled out from the Carolina's to Iowa on covered wagons. I've seen the pictures to prove it, too.

When Barney and I walked into the room the floor lamps were blazing with a golden light produced by maybe 30 watts, Cousin Henry was plinking on the off-key piano, the adults were talking about serious subjects like Aunt Fern and her many boyfriends, and the kids were trying to see how obnoxious they could get before a parent would cuff them behind the head. Needless to say, there was a din in the room somewhat equal to an Irish wake at full wake.

"Burrrrppppppp" came flying out of Barney with a resonance that silenced the room. You see, Barney had stopped in the kitchen on the way through the house and taken four or five big swigs straight out of a milk carton in a failed attempt to cancel out his withering breath. That milk hit the cider in his stomach and did exactly like any chemistry teacher will tell you it should do - it began to create gas. Frankly, at that moment, given the chemical experiment that Barney had just precipitated, he was lucky the gas took the quickest way out.

"What's that, Barney," asked Grandpa, proving once again that his hearing was just one decibel away from being totally gone.

"I wuz just thinkin' that we could all sing some Christmas songs, Grandpa," said Barney, in an unusually respectful tone of voice.

In the silence of the big room, every ear heard the words and translated them into their own interpretation of what that might mean.

"What'd he say, Bub?" asked Grandpa.

Uncle Bub must have still been mad at his son as he translated in a loud voice, "Barney wants to sing some Christmas songs for everyone, dad."

"Well, let him go ahead then for criminy sake. We haven't had any good singing around here since that night when that skunk tried to spoon with our old yeller cat under the house."

Uncle Bub pushed his son into the center of the room and said in the voice he reserved for times when he didn't want any backtalk, "Sing, Barney."

I would never argue with Uncle Bub, and Barney was smart enough, even in his inebriated condition, not to do so, either.

"Uh, okay, daddy," was all he could blurt out with only a slight slur. Then he launched into The First Noel, making up words when he couldn't remember the right ones. "The first noel, the ranger did see, was two curtain-poor leopards in fie-lds of hay." It wasn't accurate, but Barney kind of had the tune right and catching a second wind he filled his lungs to put more emphasis into the second verse.

Which just happened to coincide with the culmination of one of the finest home chemistry experiments ever witnessed by my family.

Just as Barney opened his mouth and threw the full power of his diaphragm into bellowing out more music, a real funny look flashed across his eyes for an instant and he literally projected an angry concoction of almost a quart of fermented cider and newly soured milk right at the Christmas tree and the little window.

Fire hoses have no more velocity or volume than Barney had that fateful day at Grandpa Franklin's house and we all stood or sat there, frozen in time, watching in slow motion as Barney's entire being repelled the alien invasion that had tried to take over his body.

In less than five seconds, Barney's mouth closed and would not reopen that wide for at least another six weeks, until after they had removed the wires on his jaw that were installed after Uncle Bub tried to cuff him into the next county.

It was the end of innocence in our family, but there were two very real and very valuable lessons that were learned by all of us.

First, it was clear that Barney had a gift for transforming a drunken moment into a memorable event.

Second, the curdled milk and fermented apple cider had sprayed the Christmas tree and the little window with a white frothy substance that quickly hardened into what Grandpa Franklin would later call "one of the most beautiful Christmas snow scenes" he had ever seen.

Not one to lose an opportunity, an inspired Uncle Bub eventually patented a process that he called "flocking" that is still used today to make Christmas trees look like they've been hit with snow. (I think he came up with the name for it when he was cuffing Barney.) He also came up with those little cans of white froth that people use to make their windows look like they have snow collected in the corners where the little wooden slats meet.

And Barney? Well, we all know Barney. He still can't sing, although most dogs and small howling animals in any neighborhood near him will beg to differ.

Me? I became a writer so I could politely decline the opportunity to either sing or drink. But I do know the words to The First Noel, and I still hate hard cider and milk to this day.