Kettle River news

The next Kettle River council meeting is at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 12 at the Kettle River Senior Center.

Cookies and caroling will be at 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 19 at the Suomalainen Kirkko (Finnish Cultural Center) on the corner of Minnesota Highway 73 and Carlton County Road 6. Bring cookies to share, and join in singing the old familiar carols.

One Christmas, my sister and her boyfriend, Jack, were joking around, and she told him she was going to get him a bottle of booze for Christmas.

That year, we had purchased a bottle of rum for making our rum fudge, and we got an idea. The bottle had a cork, and my father had a new syringe and large needle, which he used sometimes when he had to inject glue under a loose tile in his floor covering business.

So we took the syringe and needle and drained all the rum out of the bottle, then made tea the same color and refilled the bottle. My sister then wrapped it up for her boyfriend. After he opened the bottle, we said we should all have some. We poured him some straight rum and all the rest of us had the tea. As we were sitting there giggling and sipping our tea, my other sister’s boyfriend, Fred, arrived. We insisted he have some, and handed him a glass and poured some tea into it. He took one swallow and said, “This is tea.”

Then Jack knew why we had been laughing, and had to laugh too, knowing we had played a joke on him.