by Annie Smith
Now, you’ve got to be aware that Spam ain’t no diet food. Every can contains ninety-six grams of fat. So if your kids are porking up, switch to Spam Lite—which has a mere forty-eight fat grams.
Spam—the unofficial state vegetable of Georgia—can be prepared so many ways it’s unbelievable. Here’s a sample menu of Annie’s daily meals at our house:
Breakfast—Cut a can of Spam into quarter-inch slices, slap them in the skillet, and fry until they’re turning crispy. Throw in some eggs, fry sunny side up until the edges are brown, and dump the Spam and eggs on your young’uns’ plates.
Don’t forget that every redneck family’s breakfast table has to have a giant jar of apple butter on it. In Tennessee, some parents have been arrested for child neglect because they forgot the apple butter.
And you’ve got to have hot biscuits and real butter for breakfast—plus a jar of ketchup for the rowdy boys who like to make their Spam look fresh killed.
Dinner (which Yankees call “lunch”)—Make some cold Spam sandwiches with Wonder Bread, cheap mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomatoes. Serve with grape Kool-Aid.
Supper (“dinner”)—Finely chop two cans of Spam and mash all the meat together with two eggs (take off the shells first), four ripped-up slices of bread, a chopped onion, and a big bunch of ketchup. Whack the pile into a loaf shape with a big wooden spoon and bake the thing until it’s brown on top.
Serve the Spam loaf with canned green beans—Luck’s brand if you can get ’em—and mashed potatoes made from scratch.
If you parents would sometimes like to have a romantic dinner at home after getting the kids to bed, light a little birthday candle on the table and treat the two of you to a couple of fine wine coolers.
Outside Dinin’
Never go to a restaurant that doesn’t offer a “value” meal. And if it doesn’t have a drive-through window, keep on driving until you find one that does.
Set-down restaurants always cost twice as much (unless it’s Denny’s). And if the menu’s got a fancy tassel hanging from it, add ten dollars per person per tassel inch.
Here’s another way to spot expensive restaurants: The name is always misspelled. Never chow down at a place that’s got Ristorante or Centre or Olde on the sign outside. You’re bound to be overcharged—because if these people can’t spell, they sure can’t add your bill right.
Rufus McKinney learned the hard way about arm-and-a-leg restaurants. When he drove his family up to Ohio to see his wife’s cousin four years ago, he decided to live it up and took them to a highfalutin French restaurant. Big mistake.
Rufus says his kids pigged out on dujour soup and whores devours, and the bill was more than his whole weekly paycheck from the egg-packing plant!
The poor man had to have a Happy Meal to cheer up. (Come to think of it, why does McDonald’s have a Happy Meal, but Burger King has a cross san’wich?)
You’re more apt to get good prices and good food at a truck stop. Or a restaurant that’s got a sign saying Buses Welcome. But be careful if all the buses in the parking lot say State Prison on the side.
Lastly, stay clear of diners that advertise a “family atmosphere.” Hell, who wants to put up with kids screaming and grabbing food while you’re trying to eat?
Moonshine and Other Medications
Childhood is a minefield of pesky and even dangerous illnesses. There’s not a kid alive who hasn’t nearly died from the whooping cough, measles, mumps, the flu, and hundreds of colds.
Why, if we’d kept all the snot our kids blew out of their noses while they were growing up, we’d be able to fill up the town’s big elevated water tank.
Which would have made it interesting when the townsfolk took baths.
Of course, dirty ol’ Rufus McKinney never woulda noticed.
When your young’uns come down with a cold or the flu, you can buy all kinds of over-the-counter medications down at the Piggly Wiggly market. But that stuff’s expensive and usually won’t help a bit, so we recommend treating the kids with your own homemade preparations.
Here are some of our favorites, guaranteed to work:
• Dissolve some rock sugar in a warm glass of moonshine, add a twist of lemon if you’ve got one, and give your kids a little sip to break a fever. Don’t let them overdo the sipping, though, or pretty soon they’ll start pestering you to bring in a jukebox and will get into a brawl with their brothers.
• Mix up some yellow sulfur and pure hog lard. Smear it on a clear clean cloth to make a poultice, and apply this to your child’s chest when she’s got any kind of chest cold.
A sulfur-lard plaster also is a cure for athlete’s feet on people and the mange on dogs. Maybe even athlete’s feet on dogs.
• A good remedy for constipation is a green apple. This will loosen up a kid’s innards within minutes, and he’ll spend more time in the outhouse than the Sears catalog.
Home First Aid for Kids
Once your children wear out a snot rag, wash it real good and tear it into strips to use as bandages for small cuts or tourniquets for snakebites or real blood-gusher gashes.
If your kid loses a toe or finger in a bicycle accident, whittle him a new one out of wood. Tape it on the stub and warn him that this time he’d better take care of it!
Do your young’uns have stinking feet? Wash them in bleach and water to kill the smell. Then throw the kid in the dryer and spin him around a few minutes.
A good home treatment for a burn is to slice a cold raw potato and hold it against the burned spot. (Don’t try this with a hot french fry.)
To protect your brood’s health all year round, give them a big spoonful of castor oil each fall and a dose of cod liver oil every spring.
These awful-tasting preventives are what our parents inflicted on us when we were growing up, and we almost never got sick—or at least admitted it for fear they’d whip out the bottles again.
Another easy preventive is frying all your kids’ food in pure lard.
We’re convinced that lard and fat keep people from catching colds. Eskimos eat blubber all the time—and we’ve never in our lives seen an Eskimo with a runny nose.
Stuttering
Don’t worry about it. Mel Tillis’s stutter made him a fortune in country music and the Smokey movies. Maybe your kid can do the same.
Nine Greatest Redneck Tragedies
Your kids might expect life to always be filled with fun and games. You’ve got to warn them to expect a few bumps in the road every now and then—otherwise they’ll be completely unprepared when trouble strikes.
So sit down with your young’uns and carefully go over this list of the nine worst calamities that could loom in their future:
1. Loss of a wife.
2. Loss of a cousin (See 1).
3. Loss of a cinder block.
4. Losing a wheel on your home while moving.
5. Watching a deadbeat drive away without paying, sticking you with his bill, while you’re on duty at the gas station.
6. Having to sell your coon dog because he’s gone deaf and you ain’t got the money for a hearing aid.
7. Your pickup truck blows a head gasket.
8. Loss of a husband.
9. Suffering a horrible hemorrhoid attack on a hard church bench.
10. Flicking your cigarette ashes between your legs while sitting on the commode, then realizing the hot ashes didn’t hit the water.
11. Losing a show ’n’ tell contest at work to see who’s got the most teeth.
12. Getting your meat freezer stolen off your front porch.
Redneck’s hideaway
Outhouse Dos and Don’ts
The outhouse is disappearing fast in America, which is a shame because we personally don’t believe in indoor bathrooms.
We think it’s disgusting that people do their business right down the hall from where they cook their food.
Our outhouse sits proudly on the hill behind our home, and it’s been there for over fifty years. Our grandparent
s used it, our parents used it, we used it, and, God willing, our kids will still be using it long after we’ve walked through the pearly gates.
Here’s what to teach your young’uns about the proper use of the outhouse:
• Don’t wipe with a page ripped straight out of the catalog. Crumple up the page over and over until it’s soft.
• Always shut the door completely in the wintertime, or else the cold wind will whip inside and leave you with a big icicle on your most private private part.
If you’re a girl, people might mistake you for a boy until the icicle melts—and if you’re a boy, the girls will stare and flirt.
• On Halloween night, post a guard on the outhouse so juvenile delinquents won’t push it over. Grandma’s weak bladder makes her go at all hours of the night, and her heart might not be able to take being suddenly horizontal.
• Don’t let your sons join their buddies in outhouse races.
This is a game where several teams of kids uproot outhouses and see which team can carry theirs to the town limits first. Problem is, they never take the outhouse holes—and Lord knows who might fall in one of them smelly pits.
Reverend Joshua Boatwright stumbled right into our neighbor’s hole one dark night while taking a shortcut home from a tent revival, and we’ve never heard such language come out of a minister’s mouth. We thought he’d been possessed by the devil, or Howard Stern.
Entertaining in the Outhouse
Going to the little shack out back can be a fun experience if you just listen to our advice:
• Keep reading material in the outhouse so your young’uns can improve their minds while they wait.
But don’t leave a Playboy out there, or you might never see your sons on weekends.
The Weekly World News is a good reading choice for the outhouse. This lively supermarket newspaper is easy to read, lets you keep up with all the latest Elvis sightings, and is a lot more kind to your behind than Time’s hard, shiny pages.
• Keep the outhouse furnishings simple and free of clutter. You want your kids to get in and get out as soon as possible, not sit in there and dawdle.
Don’t allow the boys to stick sexy Reba McEntire posters on the walls, and don’t let the girls put up a mirror to pretty themselves while they’re inside. Distractions like that will just lead to squabbles when one kid hogs the outhouse.
Shorty Perkins, who got a bit uppity after buying one-eighth interest in the Swifty gas station, decided to fix his outhouse real fancy. He strung an electrical line out to it and put in a lightbulb. Then he added a frosted globe over the bulb.
Next thing we knew, Shorty had installed a color TV and VCR so his wife, Pauline, could watch her Love Boat tape collection while she was on the pot.
Only problem was, Rufus McKinney found out about the color television and started sneaking into Shorty’s outhouse to watch the Daytona 500 and other races.
Rufus—who didn’t have a TV at that time—would always lock the door. It got to where Shorty and Pauline couldn’t even use their own outhouse.
Finally all hell broke loose on the day Shorty got a bad case of the runs—and it just happened to be the same day as the Coca-Cola 600 over in Charlotte. Rufus wasn’t about to be disturbed during that big once-a-year event and even brought along his twelve-gauge shotgun to keep away disturbers.
Shorty hung around the outhouse door, banging and begging and looking as agitated as a cow trying to reach a salt lick on the other side of an electrified fence. But Rufus just turned the TV up louder.
So poor Shorty was out of luck, and soon out of clean shorts.
Next day the TV and VCR got sold cheap. Shorty used the money to buy a drawerful of new BVDs and half a case of Imodium A-D.
He posted one bottle on the outhouse door in a little red box that’s marked: “Break Glass in Emergency.”
* * *
Rednecks’ Five Favorite TV Shows
1. Walker, Texas Ranger
2. Hee-Haw (bootleg videos)
3. The Andy Griffith Show (pre-Mayberry, RFD)
4. The Beverly Hillbillies (reruns)
5. Fishin’ shows featuring country singers
* * *
Putting the X Back in Christmas
Every redneck boy and girl wants a pit bull for Christmas. But these dogs are the “Gift That Keeps on Living,” and they’ll eat most families out of house and home before the next Christmas arrives.
It’s better to give your young’uns a stuffed pit bull. This breed is so bad about attacking people that they often get shot, and you can get a good deal on a carcass if you’re in the right place at the right time. (Don’t let anybody see your gun.)
Other good presents for kids are gift certificates to fast-food restaurants. Or give them batteries for Christmas, along with a card that says Toy Not Included. They’re not going to like any toy you pick out anyway, so make them pay for their own.
The best places to buy Christmas gifts for a wife are gun and knife shows. And if you surprise her with a pistol of her own, don’t forget the concealed weapons permit.
Husbands appreciate twelve-packs of beer, another shotgun, and a whoopee cushion for hours of rollicking entertainment down at the bar.
Uncle Billy always buys Aunt Alma romantic stuff for Christmas. We don’t know where the heck he got it, but one year he gave her a bottle of French perfume labeled “Eau de Toilette Is Overflowing.” The white porcelain bottle was shaped just like a little commode.
A gift the whole family can enjoy is whole-house air conditioning. Look for bargains on used window units and buy one for every room of your home.
Wrap each unit separately in beautiful paper and stack ’em under the Christmas tree. Your kids will be expecting dolls or toy trucks—and boy, will they be surprised!
The Redneck Stock Portfolio
You want your young’uns to be financially secure when they grow up, so another good Christmas gift is a cow or a pig. They can sell it later on and start building a nest egg for their future.
If you can’t afford stock for the holidays, get your kids to invest in a good animal as soon as they start making their own money.
When the market is bullish, kids can lay away a steer at some stockyards and pay only a dollar or so a month on it.
But don’t let them invest in billy goat futures. Billy goats ain’t got no futures. These danged critters will eat anything—and if your kid’s investment gets hold of some spoiled garbage, the market will go belly up.
Hardheaded Hillbillies in a Software World
More and more kids are asking for computers for Christmas, mostly because they want to play video games.
Our young’uns are growing up in a much more complicated world than the one we grew up in. Scientists have invented so many things—most of ’em too complicated to use—that you just can’t keep up with it all.
In Mayhew County the “information highway” is still just a one-lane dirt road where you have to stop and ask directions. We ain’t up to date on computers, slide rules, and other wonders of the twentieth century—and don’t really want to learn.
But we think it’s time for your kids to know about technology, so we stuck in this section despite not knowing a durned thing about the subject.
Wiley Watkins—who claims to know something about everything—kindly set down and wrote out these definitions of some newfangled technical terms for us. We can’t speak for their accuracy since we know Wiley all too well, but here goes:
software—Uncle Billy’s embarrassing condition when he’s had too many beers before hittin’ the sack with Aunt Alma.
hardware—Assorted stuff, such as metal brackets and electric outlet covers, that you screw all over the outside of your computer to make it look like a junk pile so nobody will steal it. You can buy all you need at a hardware store.
boot the computer—What you do when you can’t figure out how to turn on the doggone thing. (Tony Lama bull-hides work best.)
mouse—Y
our place of residence. “Wanna eat supper at m’ouse or your’n?”
RAM—One of the best pickup trucks ever to come out of Dodge.
monitor—An ironclad ship, crewed by a miserable bunch of Yankee lowlifes, that ambushed the proud Confederate ship Merrimac during the War between the States.
on-line—Where all the cowboys and cowgirls go to when dancing starts at the local honky-tonk.
upload—Chug-a-lugging a six-pack in six minutes flat.
download—A quick trip to the men’s room after all that beer.
fax—A husband’s version of the night’s events when he comes home late. “I had a flat and there wasn’t a phone for miles, honey—and them’s the fax!”
modem—A request for extra stuff: “Gimme mo’dem mashed potaters.”
voice mail—This is where your phone gets cut off for nonpayment and you’ve got to holler at your neighbor to give her the latest gossip.
microwave—A “wave” done by the few fans who attend football games at Chicken Neck Junior College, which hasn’t won a single game since 1906. (Although one plucky team did battle Mayhew County Normal School to a 0-0 tie back in ’54, giving excited fans cause to tear down the two-by-fours.)
How a redneck boots his computer
Quaint Redneck Superstitions
It’s traditional for parents to pass down redneck folklore to their young’uns, and that includes superstitions. Here are some your kids ought to know about:
• If someone sweeps under your feet while you’re sitting down, it means you’re gonna get married. If it happens twice in the same day, you’re going to get shot by her daddy if you don’t make that li’l gal your wife.
• If a sweeper hits you with her broom, you’re going to jail within a week.