Bloggin' Umholtz

I've got the drop on you!!

Apparently on, New Years Eve, people drop things around here for amusement. Now I know all about the ball dropping in Time Square. Even old enough to recall a couple of Guy Lombardo concerts, but people around here have taken things a bit farther than a ball of bright white…”Walk towards the light, walk towards the light…Luke, you are my son…Shane! Come back, Shane…

Oh sorry, the medication was wearing off. Now where was I? Yes, extremes. There’s a town not too far from here that drops a pickle. Yep, that’s right, a pickle. In case you’d like to witness this, the town is called…Dillsburg. What else would a pickle dropping community be called?

Not to be outdone another local community drops a lollipop. I haven’t seen this lollipop but I wonder, is it an all day sucker? Do they have singing munchkins from the Wizard of OZ? Is there a little girl in curls singing, “On the Good Ship, Lollipop…”And if you’re going to take in the Lollipop drop, which is in Hummelstown, you should hurry down the road to Hershey, where they drop, what else, a Hershey kiss. Mechanicsburg drops a wrench of course. (Done that many times myself). If you ask me it would be more fun to drop a wench. (Done that many times also. The real fun is in catching them) And Harrisburg? Why they drop a huge red strawberry. At least I think they drop it, since I watched them hoisting it skyward yesterday.

Now, I can understand all this need to celebrate New Years. And I can understand the fascination with dropping things. We did something similar where I grew up. Of course we rarely dropped the same thing twice, except for maybe the wrench…or our pants (can anyone say “group moon”?), and it wasn’t often on New Year’s, though occasionally, by pure accident, was. But drop, nonetheless, we did. We dropped:

          1.A WWII message canister, complete with parachute from the breast of an Army Corp of Engineer’s dam. It was the highest point around at the moment. It still wasn’t high enough for the ‘chute to open and it took a nice chip out of the concrete in the spillway.

          2.We dropped M-80’s off of the bridge above the Susquehanna River at Falls, PA. Mostly because we could. (And they made a big bang!)

          3.We dropped/threw homemade explosives into local abandoned mine ponds to see if there was anything living in them. Duh.

          4.We dropped off the sides of buildings and local rock formations on ropes. Note: do not use clothesline. Mom gets real mad.

          5.We even dropped a deer or two when the opportunity arose…but never at midnight. Well, almost never.

So you see I’m well schooled in this dropping thing Why’ there’s even been a time or two when I attempted to drop off the planet, but I could never seem to figure that one out. (Gravity sucks). But right now I’m trying to figure out how to be in two places at once, because you see, Pottsville drops a beer and Red Lion drops a cigar. Now if only someone would drop a TV with a football game playing I’d have it made.

Happy New Year, Everyone! Have a safe and healthy one.