Attend The Tale Of Baby Butch

As a gift to each other, we stopped giving each other Christmas presents about 20 years ago. After all, we have the same tastes in music & books. We buy each other gifts throughout the year, often for no reason at all. We do our birthdays & Valentines Day. It just seemed a nice thing to take it easy when most people are at their craziest. It is a very modest holiday at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia, but we do have our traditions.

More than 29 years ago, the Husband & I raided my parent’s storage cabinets in the basement of their beautiful Spanish style home on the South Hill neighborhood of Spokane. I knew there were treasures to be had & I was sure that they had not looked at their storage in at least 10 years & they were sitting on some treasures that should be mine. We took a few choice items that I was sure the folks would never miss, the coolest of which was my father’s doll from his early childhood- Baby Butch. Baby Butch was missing an arm & he was in pieces, but he was a very great looking guy from the early 1930s & I loved him because he was my dad’s, & I liked the fact that my very butch father had a doll in his childhood that he loved so much that he carried him around for decades & several moves. It was an unusual choice, I actually hate dolls, but I was very drawn to Baby Butch. So, he came to live with me & the Husband.


I knew that my parents had not looked at the things in storage for a very long time; I was surprised when the phone call came a few days after the abduction of the doll. My mother wanted to know if I had taken the beloved Baby Butch. I admitted that I had & I was incredulous that they would have taken note of him gone missing, when they hadn’t looked at him for a decade. I also stated that he was living with us now, & that my father could have visitation rights. For 29 Christmases, Baby Butch has played the Baby Jesus in our annual crèche. The set up changes from year to year, but Baby Butch is always the star of our Christmas pageant. I never got to play Baby Jesus, or even Joseph or even a wise man. At church, in the 2nd grade, I did get to play 3rd ass to the left. The Story of My Life.