When is the last time you've done absolutely nothing for an extended period of time?.

I'm lucky enough to have a few days off at Christmas, and we had a great holiday. It was nice to hang out with relatives we don't see enough of during the year, but something radical also happened that may be shocking for some readers. If you faint easy or are prone to fits of dyspepsia, you may want to turn around now and look for a nice relaxing column about politics. 

There was plenty on the social calendar this Christmas, but there were also multi-hour blocks of time with nothing scheduled. Throw in the sensation of not having to go to work for a few days and these blocks of nothing morphed into something I once heard described as "relaxation".

Most adults I know are busier than a rented mule, so it was a revelation to feel the ol' brain untense. By the time I get back to work I'm sure I will have forgotten every computer password and quite possibly my own name, but it will have been worth it.

This window of relaxation wasn't spent simply staring at the floor. I took a few minutes to finalize a project that's being sold on Amazon. I read a few chapters of one of the books on my shelf I've been meaning to read for over a year. A musician buddy and I listened to the latest albums by The Who and Bob Mould. I even introduced the Tax Deductions to the storytelling genius of Jerry Clower.

"I flew from Los Angeles to North Dakota where it was 28 degrees below zero," Clower's voice announced from the spinning record. "It was so cold I slept between the mattresses."

Even the Tax Deductions benefited from the downtime. They both received yoga mats for Christmas, and by the afternoon of the 25th, they'd already grown tired of me asking them why they needed a special mat to eat yogurt on.

"How does the yogurt mat work?" I asked. "Is yogurt so messy you need a four-foot mat to protect the furniture? Do they make mats for fried chicken? Then you'd have something."

When I wasn't aggravating them, the TDs went around the house with a can of WD-40 spraying any doors or hinges that squeaked. This was a revelation for TD#2.

"It makes all the doors quiet," TD#2 said in a sinister whisper. "Now I can go outside and no one will know!"

While I was on Google searching for ways to reactivate squeaks in recently lubricated hinges, my phone dinged. My sister sent a photo of my nephew Brennan shooting up a gingerbread house with a BB gun:

Before anyone from the powerful gingerbread lobby starts picketing our offices or pelting our staff with gumdrops, please note that Brennan built the structure himself. He's shown interest in demolition as a career, and everyone has to start somewhere.

I hadn't been sick all year until I took it easy for a few days last week. By Saturday I had a slight cold, but I got it together in time to visit with some relatives on Saturday night. During the course of the evening, I heard a few classic family stories and one that was new to me. A classic that comes up every year involves my grandma (who was a little hard of hearing) giving the women in the family underwear for Christmas, and then in front of God and everyone asking, "ARE THEY BIG ENOUGH?". 

Then there's the time my great grandfather drove up in the yard and saw my twin uncles William and Wiley under the tractor shelter. They were about three-years-old at the time and had gotten into some tractor grease. After bathing in the grease they then played in the loose dirt under the shelter. When their mother walked over from the garden and saw them she was livid, but my great grandfather offered a solution.

"It would be less trouble to just get two new younguns than clean up those two," he said.

There are countless stories about William and Wiley, including one when they were (no doubt deservedly) getting a spanking in the yard and their dog, in an effort to protect them, bit my grandma on the posterior. Since the dog was technically protecting the children, my granddaddy didn't take any action. This incident was a sore spot in more ways than one for decades.

The story I'd never heard was told by my dad about his uncle Mike, who had trouble telling the twins William and Wiley apart. 

"William and Wiley liked to go the mill with Uncle Mike," he said. "So to be able to tell them apart he wrote their names on their forehead with an ink pen."

This was in the early 1960s, so there weren't people running around taking pictures of every second of every day with their phones. However, if anyone out there has a photo of my uncles with their names written on their forehead I will pay top dollar for it. The weekly ink poisonings explain so much, and if I can find a decent photo of it I'll make it my life's mission to weave it into the family crest.

Jon Dawson's humor columns are published weekly by Neuse News. Contact Jon at jon@neusenews.com and buy his books at www.jondawson.com.