Judge Bubba’s Christmas Letters: 1995–Present

By H. Sage Morgan

Judge Bubba is now a semi-retired judge, living on a farm with his wife of 39 years, R.D., and their golden retriever, Sam Houston. Bubba and R.D. operate a horse boarding stable on their property. R.D. says sometimes Bubba has the brain of a gnat. But Bubba disagrees: If he's so stupid how'd he know the name of that insect is spelled with a silent g?

His annual Christmas letters chronicle the misadventures and travails of Judge Bubba, his family, friends and associates around his farm and his community where there is a constant battle with skunks, fish, criminal behavior, bodily dysfunction, errors in judgment, and even hostile cottonwood trees.

As Jimmy Jet says in the foreword: Judge Bubba’s response to the usual obnoxious Christmas letters could easily be titled “The Bubba Annual Report: What Could Go Wrong?” because go wrong it often does.

H. Sage Morgan was raised in Texas and earned undergraduate, graduate, and law degrees from schools there. In 1975, Sage moved to the Intermountain West, where he met R.D. in a cram course for the state bar exam. They married in 1976 and now each is a senior magistrate judge (i.e., mostly retired rent-a-judge).

Sage and R.D. have a rural lifestyle, living on their farm with their golden retriever Sam Houston, where they grow hay and board horses for other people.

They have one son, Earp, now an attorney and married to Katrina, as well as grandchildren Jack, Gage, Landry...and Rowan who has preceded all of the family to Heaven.

• Language: English
• Publisher: H. Sage Morgan
• Release date: Jan 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311783073

H. Sage Morgan

H. Sage Morgan was raised in Texas and earned undergraduate, graduate, and law degrees from schools there. In 1975, Sage moved to the Intermountain West, where he met R.D. in a cram course for the state bar exam. They married in 1976 and now each is a senior magistrate judge (i.e., mostly retired rent-a-judge). Sage and R.D. have a rural lifestyle, living on their farm with their golden retriever Sam Houston, where they grow hay and board horses for other people. They have one son, Earp, now an attorney and married to Katrina, as well as Jack, Gage, Landry...and Rowan who has preceded all of us to Heaven.

Book preview

Dedication

To my wife, Rhoda Dendran (R.D.) Morgan

…you are the loveliest, most intelligent, kindest,

hardest-working, most generous, most loving,

and sweetest person I’ve ever known…

thanks for putting up with me!

All my love,

Bubba

FOREWORD

by

Jimmy Jet

J.D., D.J., Notary Public

THE HONORABLE JUDGE BUBBA asked me to write the foreword to this book and I could not be more honored. Having never written a foreword, I researched writing such on Google and discovered to my dismay that the foreword should be written by an experienced and qualified individual with noted credentials. Oops!

Alas. Proceed we shall anyway. I have known Judge Bubba for many decades. He is a hard-working man who lives on a farm with his lovely wife, Rhoda, and until his retirement was a sitting judge. He is a man of very high intellect but, as he readily admits and writes about so well in this book, modest physical motor skills.

He has the biggest barrel laugh of any person on earth. And his laugh is contagious. A bunch of us once went to a comedy club with Bubba and we sat in the front row. During the performance, Judge Bubba started laughing so hard that the rest of the audience joined in and the whole place was laughing so much (including the comedian) that the whole show came to a stop for five minutes waiting for the laughter to settle down. It was like that all night!!! Laughter, it turns out, is good therapy and Bubba is the key therapist.

Reading this book is that kind of therapy. It is about the annual misadventures and travails of Judge Bubba, his family, friends, and neighbors around the household, his farm, and their community. It details the constant battle of the waistline bulge. It could be subtitled The Bubba Annual Report: What Could Go Wrong? And go wrong it often does. And he recorded it all in his annual Christmas letters.

Over the decades, as the first day of December rolled around, I would always look expectantly at the mailbox, waiting in anticipation for that one piece of mail worth reading. That mail was Judge Bubba’s Annual Christmas Letter. This letter was his response to the usual obnoxious Christmas letters we were all subjected to that extolled and prattled on about other people’s successes. Nope. Not for Bubba! Judge Bubba’s Christmas letters were entirely different. They were blunt and honest. They were historical, true, and funnier than hell. Now, some twenty years of those great Christmas letters are contained in this book.

For example, you will learn (probably more than you ever wanted to) about hilarious and rollicking mishaps, medical emergencies, gastrointestinal distress, hunting and fishing adventures, and stories from his days as a judge on the bench, plus you will laugh out loud at the misfortunes with cats, dogs, farm animals, skunks, and even hostile cottonwood trees.

And finally, he sets out the decades of efforts (mostly unsuccessful—well, impossible, really) by his lovely wife and daughter-in-law to correct his insufficiencies and inadequacies and to mold him into a better man.

I hope you enjoy reading these letters as much as I did over the decades.

INTRODUCTION

DURING THE CHRISTMAS SEASON each year, it is the custom in our country to send holiday greeting cards to friends and family…and no doubt we all receive, or may be guilty of sending, Christmas cards bearing only signed or printed names of the sender, but containing a typewritten and photocopied insert detailing the highlights of the sender’s year in review.

I had never included such inserts in the cards we send during the holidays because I don’t think people are really all that interested in what I did, on a month-by-month basis, during the preceding year. Furthermore, I rarely read and, at best, merely skim those inserts sent by others to me because I’m usually too busy or too lazy to do so.

Following receipt of one particularly self-serving and boring insert back in the early ’90s, I decided to draft and send my very own Christmas letter, detailing the stupid stuff that I did or that happened around my immediate family circle that year. Since I cannot remember anything that occurred longer than fifteen minutes ago, I started keeping a diary of the funny stuff on a daily calendar for use in my letter. The response from my distribution list to the first Christmas letter was positive, and I discovered I really enjoyed hearing back that I had made others laugh.

Thus, every year since (except for one), I have sent Judge Bubba’s Christmas Letter to family and friends. In my diary, I began keeping book on not only family and friends, but also social and professional acquaintances. These folks learned too late that disclosure of their screw-ups to me would lead to inclusion in my next Christmas letter for all the world to see. This format of Christmas letters continued unabated for thirteen or fourteen years until I told a tattletale (since redacted) in 2008 that I thought was funny, but hurt the feelings of a good friend.

Thereafter, my annual letters have become topical, mostly involving my darling wife Rhoda’s recurring frustrations from dealing with me.

So, here are Judge Bubba’s Christmas Letters. Names have been changed to protect the guilty. I hope you find them at least, mildly amusing. They are true...with only slight exaggeration in the telling.

Hon. H. Sage Morgan

December 2015

1995

Merry Christmas

EVERY TIME WE RECEIVE a Year in the Life of _______ letter like this during the holidays, I become nauseated from the sender’s audacity that I would care enough to read it. So, contrary to our annual tradition of (sending Christmas cards) (sending Christmas cards only to those people from whom we’ve received cards) sending no Christmas cards, we are conveying this Yuletide message to you.

Our horse boarding operation is still going well. The biggest excitement of the year involved the theft of stoppers from the automatic waterers, which caused flooding of the barnyard on several occasions. Originally fearing vandalism, we soon discovered that the culprit was a raccoon, with its opposable thumbs, who’d taken up residence in the loft of our barn. When the coon refused to return our stoppers, we were convinced by some Save the Whales lady from our local university to borrow her live trap over her fear it was a lactating female. Alas, the rascal was moved to the local river bottom instead of expiring from lead poisoning.

In August, I got so sick from the flu and from my family’s nagging that I stopped chewing tobacco after twenty years of constant use. I feel good about stopping, but I have since eaten everything in sight and grown in girth to epic proportions. I didn’t know they made blue jeans with an ass this large! Unfortunately, the extra tonnage has caused me to snore even louder, so my wife, Rhoda (R.D.), makes me wear those stick-on nose strips to bed. After putting one on, I like to flex in front of the bathroom mirror and dream of the NFL.

On the television show Jeopardy, I can answer every question on the Civil War, but nothing else.

We have a religion major from the college where R.D. teaches, whom we’ve named SloMo, living in our basement. The son of American missionaries to the South Pacific, he is generally clueless, but a decent lad. After SloMo cut off the tips of two of his fingers when adjusting the height of our lawnmower while it was running, I demoted him from Foreman in Charge of Power Tools.

I have chosen to change my nickname and shall henceforth be called Boat Trouble. Though often stranded by engine failure miles from the dock, I continue my passion for bass fishing, which has been passed on to my son Earp. In April, I even lipped an 8-pound largemouth! Too bad my friend Kaufman hooked it just after I had scoffed at the limber, little trout pole, and weenie $0.99 K-Mart spinner bait he was using.

In February, Earp (now fifteen years old) went through driver’s ed. Regrettably, as parents, we were required to ride in the back seat during his final driving exam. I promised Earp that I would remain silent, not teasing him during the test; however, R.D. let out a bloodcurdling scream to warn of an impending collision as Earp backed out of the driveway to begin. I kept my promise, only jamming my brake foot down and puckering my butt five to six times during the rest of the test, saying nothing even when Earp made a wide turn, running a lady in another vehicle completely off the road. When the test concluded, our son got really mad at me when I got out of the car and kissed the ground! Earp has his daytime driver’s license now, but needless to say, we don’t allow him to drive alone yet.

I am now at the age where my body is starting to change, and I’m convinced that every signal is terminal. For some time, I’ve thought that I alone suffered from SBPs (i.e., shooting butt pains; you know, the ones that raise you up off a seat like you’ve been jabbed with an ice pick!). I assumed they were gonna kill me until R.D. mentioned she gets them, too. Also, I am now afflicted all over my body with rapidly growing, little wart-like protuberances called skin tags. I went to my dermatologist in May to have a bunch removed from my armpits. When I inquired whether the use of his electrode would be painful to burn off my skin tags, the doctor responded yes, but only on those he forgot to deaden.

In June, I left North America for the first time, vacationing with family and friends in Hawaii. Even though our world-travelling companion Jimmy Cook donated frequent flier miles to us for lodging, R.D. tried to cut back on airfare since Jimmy got us reservations at the Hyatt Regency in Kauai, a palace still far beyond the Morgans’ vacation budget. The cheaper fares caused us a four-hour connection layover and a need to carry our own luggage between terminals in Honolulu, thereby burning my bald head in the intense tropical sun. Upon arrival at the open air lobby of the hotel, it was indeed beautiful, and I proclaimed in my loudest Gomer Pyle voice, Gawlee, there’re birds flying through here!! Then, while exploring our room, I crushed my wife’s fingers in the closet doors. While there on the island, R.D. and Earp enjoyed snorkeling, but I was washed ashore, whale-like, in a near-drowning. My friend Jimmy and I chartered a fishing boat for an exclusive ¾-day deep-sea experience for ourselves and Earp, and we caught nothing. Later in the trip, we enjoyed a Horseback Ride to a Waterfall in the broiling sun on jaded, dude-ranch horses, only to discover that the exotic, secluded spot was in sight of the highway. Remounting, Jimmy, who isn’t a significantly accomplished equestrian, gave lead to his plodding nag, and we, our wives, and children were soon in an uncontrolled gallop over hill and dale back to the barn and its shady hay racks. Not to be outdone by that near-death experience, a few days later, we took an uneventful, motorized raft trip down the Na Pali coastline on a beautiful morning in calm seas, only to return during the windy afternoon in rough seas with swells so large that Jimmy’s daughters got so seasick that they became known as the Barfbag Sisters. I, myself, was too scared of becoming chum for a shark to get seasick! Finally, our vacation concluded in a solemn and impressive manner by a visit to the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. Attending with us were no less than 500 Japanese. I felt peculiar, sensing something strangely amiss; however, at R.D.’s insistence, I threw no one overboard.

Another justification for having children earlier in life was demonstrated to me this fall. I foolishly agreed to take my son Earp big-game hunting in the high country that dominates our state. Hunting on the vertical, I soon recognized that my son’s leg injury from football last year had completely healed and that I had forgotten to bring one essential piece of gear—an oxygen tank! Earp bagged his first buck—a 3-pointer—in October and came close to getting a cow elk in November. On neither occasion was I any help, hung up in thick brush on steep ground, whimpering for Life Flight to helicopter me to safety. Next year, I think we’ll look for dumber animals on flatter ground.

Happy Holidays,

Sage, R.D., and Earp R. Morgan

1996

Merry Christmas, Part Deux! (Or, perhaps, Part Duh!)

OVERWHELMING RESPONSE TO last year’s letter indicated you are, at least, as interested in the troubles of my life as in reading a boring letter from your second cousin in Iowa. Thus, the following…

Being