The 8th Day of Christmas - Travel Version

I may have been wrong. For six of the last seven days, I've been complaining about how bizarre it must be to have your loved one continually showing up with gifts of birds, but there's not much higher on the weirdness scale that you can go than bringing over 8 maids-a-milking as a Christmas gift. How do you react when your true love (Although let's be honest...she's got to be questioning this relationship by now.) comes through the door followed by eight women (I assume they left the cows outside) and says "Ta-da! Here's your present!" It's creepy on so many levels. Also, how did milking end up being the maids job? Lori's parents were dairy farmers, and I don't recall ever seeing a maid doing the milking on their farm. Unless there's some pictures they're not sharing with us.

While these maids may be strangely utilized (I think I'd rather have them cleaning up after the birds), the bright side is that our heroine's milk needs are taken care of for the foreseeable future. For me though, it's a bit of a pointless gift. I stopped drinking milk when I was 13, choosing instead to follow a strict program of Coke consumption for the last three decades or so. My dentist doesn't approve, but at least I know that no matter where I go, my favorite drink is very likely to be on the shelf. So for the eighth day of Christmas, what I'd really like is to visit the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, Georgia. A chance to see where this perfect liquid is made, sample sixty different flavors, and meet the Coke bear sounds like a perfect Christmas gift to me. It's almost as if a bright, shining star has risen in the East over Atlanta, and it's telling me to follow it to come and pay tribute. Or maybe I've read that somewhere before.

Let's have a Coke and a smile, and sum this story up.

On the eighth day of Christmas, what you should get for me...

Eight Cokes for Drinking,
Seven Spots for Surfing,
Six Beaches for Playing,
Five Olympic Rings....
Four Star Wars Angry Birds,
Three Healthy Children,
Two nights at Turtle Bay, and a
Hotel room in a pine tree.


Written by Steve Pratt