Shawn Vestal: The Christmas my new BB gun nearly shot the eye out of my cousin

It was 1974, and my brother and I thought we were getting minibikes for Christmas.

He was 7. I was 8.

I don’t recall how, at those ages, we managed to get the idea that we were going to be given little motorcycles. But we lived on a farm, where driving starts young, and lots of our friends lived on farms, and we’d already ridden minibikes, so if the idea sounds far-fetched in these days of airbags and bicycle helmets, it was perhaps slightly less so at the time.

Still, we were wrong.

We did not get minibikes for Christmas in 1974.

We got BB guns.

And the way that the rest of that day unfolded has become my favorite family Christmas story: “The Year Ralph Almost Shot Lee’s Eye Out (And We Came Up With An Elaborate and Unbelievable Lie to Cover It Up and Our Parents Either Believed It or Just Weren’t All That Worried About Us, And So We Learned the Important Yuletide Lesson That Mom and Dad Don’t Need to Know Every Single Thing That Happens Out on the Haystack).”

This was well before “A Christmas Story” came out and made BB guns and the shooting out of eyes a ubiquitous theme. We got there first, in other words. My family lived on a dairy farm outside Gooding, Idaho. We were a huge clan in an extended family of huge clans: Our holiday gatherings were massive, chaotic affairs, a roiling, knotty mass of cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and shouting and crying and eating and laughing that seemed to fill every inch of whatever house we were in with an inescapable human clamor.

It was awesome, and it was excessive, and it was exhausting.

Within this mass, we children tended to break down into little societies of our own, for games of football or whatever else it was we were playing outside. And within this temporary society two teenage boys were the government: our cousins Ralph and Lee.

So, to back up a bit: We woke up that morning to discover that we had not, in fact, received minibikes, but had each received – my brother and I – a BB rifle, with a pump action. It was a morning full of present-opening, lots and lots of presents, because that’s the kind of Christmas family we are, no matter how well or how poorly our financial lives are going: excessive.

I can picture the late-morning living room even now: knee-deep in a flood of wrapping paper, all of us in our pajamas, coming down woozily from the high. My brother and I shot our new guns a little bit out in the yard. I don’t think we shot at any of the cows, but I can’t promise.

The extended family started showing up in the early afternoon. Our uncle and aunt and their millions of children from the neighboring town. Our other uncle and aunt and their millions of children from the same neighboring town. Our grandparents from a different neighboring town.

We ate a big meal, spread through the house with plates balanced on our laps. The adults sat in the living room and told dumb jokes and laughed a lot, and we kids disappeared into our temporary, independent society.

Some of us went outside with our new BB guns to play. Naturally, being Christmas and all, we played war. BB war. Two teams battling for control of the haystack.

Ralph and Lee were the generals, of course, with each claiming our brand-new guns for themselves. The two of them shot back and forth at each other from opposite ends of the haystack, and I don’t really remember what the rest of us did.

I just remember that Lee came up with a small, bright-purple wound right below his eye, inside of which was the pimple of a BB that Ralph had fired.

Was I worried about Lee? I don’t think so. I think I was mad: These jerks were going to cost us our brand-new guns before we got to really play with them.

Obviously, we could not tell our parents.

We fixed the problem with the most time-tested of all solutions: deep, deliberate dishonesty. Ralph helped dig the BB out of Lee’s cheek. We returned to the house, where we told our parents that Lee had fallen while we were playing on the haystack, and had been poked by a little stick – a particularly hard little blade of hay jutting out from a bale.

Which they seemed to believe. Or at least we thought they believed it. Looking back, they probably just didn’t pay that much attention. It was a near-miss but a minor injury, and probably one of many times the kids came running with a crisis that day.

Nobody took our BB guns after all.

This year, a lot of us who were kids on that haystack will see each other again. We’re the parents now. Our families are not quite so big, but the dynamics are the same. We adults sit around, pinned to couches by the mountain of food we just ate, telling jokes and stories – like the story of the year Ralph almost shot Lee’s eye out – while the kids sprint around like a herd of wild horses.

It’s a different era, and so there’s more parental meddling and oversight now. And yet there’s also the very definite sense that this next generation of us – of us people who have shared so much of such importance for so long – is a lot like the last generation of us. We look like each other. We sound like each other. The patterns are playing out, finding new shapes and forms inside the old ones, and it’s remarkable to see.

Miraculous, really.

At some point, one of the kids is going to get hurt.

Someone’s gonna start crying. Someone’s gonna almost put out an eye, or break an arm falling of the trampoline, or get bitten by the neighbors’ dog, or learn all the words to an Eminem song.

We’ll have to ask ourselves, we parents sitting around in our happy, fatted stupor: How much do we really need to know?