STRANGER THAN FICTION: BLT SANDWICHES CAN BE A SIGN OF GRANDMOTHERLY LOVE

Ah, the holidays.

Shoppers curse each other over parking spaces. Moms think of ways to serve six-day-old turkey for ANOTHER meal. Our two-foot-tall artificial tree stands proudly atop the entertainment center, its place in our lives secure as long as we co-habitate with ornament-eating cats.

I don't know about you, but holidays get me reflecting on my life,

the people I love and a hodge-podge of other topics that make decent

columns.

JAWS 'N' STUFF This is a sub-head*******)

There was a Jaws marathon on television last week. I think the series really went downhill after the first one. It got to where you were thankful when a teenager was eaten because it meant that boy or girl wouldn't be contributing to a gene pool somewhere.

But the most interesting group represented in the series is the Amity Town Council.

Take Jaws II. Police Chief Brody manages to get his hands on a picture of the great white shark's eye, taken by a diver shortly before he became an appetizer. He rushes into a council meeting carrying it.

There's no audience at the meeting. No reporters. Apparently, the Town Council is welcome to do anything it wants -- democracy be damned.

Anyway, too bad a reporter WASN'T covering that meeting, because it would be a journalist's dream. Here's the article:

"Police Chief Martin Brody interrupted a meeting of the Amity Town Council on Wednesday, claiming he had photographic evidence that a great white shark is eating town visitors. The move followed an incident involving Brody earlier in the week, when the chief brandished a pistol at a group of bluefish and ordered tourists to get out of the water.

"Presented with Brody's picture, council members insisted it showed a piece of seaweed, not a shark.

" 'Looks like seaweed to me,' one said.

"The group fired Brody and replaced him with one of his underlings.

In other news, a fifth body washed up on shore Wednesday night looking as though it had been mauled by some huge creature. The Amity Town Council attributed the death to seaweed."

GRANDMAS AND BLTS

The Nieland children have two grandmothers, which I like to think of as Fun Granny and Far-Side Granny.

Fun Granny, a.k.a. "Grammy," lives in Cape Girardeau with "Pop-Pop."

Yes, I'll be 28 years old in two weeks, and I still call them Grammy and Pop-Pop. Blame it on their oldest grandchild. He hung them with those childish names, and the rest of us were forced to follow suit.

Grammy and Pop-Pop didn't always live in Cape. They used to have a house in suburban Philadelphia, where I'd visit in the summers. The summer of my 11th year, I made a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich with mayo and American cheese every single morning. No cereal, no English muffins -- a fatty BLT.

Sure, Grammy made subtle hints that I should try eating something else, but what's the point of being a grandparent if you don't permit things a parent wouldn't? She also let me throw a party with my friends from the old neighborhood and didn't say anything when we used the canned sodas as squirt guns.

It was a GREAT summer.

On the other hand, there was Far-Side Granny, or Grandmother Nieland. As you can imagine from the name, she was a little more formal.

We girls would go to her home, take our assigned seats, discuss the weather and then share what was going on in our lives, dressing it up to sound as successful as possible. That was tough the year I got fired and had to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door.

All in all, those visits were a little bizarre. I felt like Pollyanna when she first got to her aunt's house. She had to fall off the roof of a four-story house and become paralyzed before the aunt loosened up a little. It just wasn't worth it to me.

At the end of every visit, we got a Jello pudding pop and $5. It was so like clockwork that it became funny. I pictured myself getting out of one of those uncomfortable chairs and saying, "Oops, your 30 minutes is up, Grandmother. That will be $5 and a Jello pudding pop, please."

She died peacefully awhile back. I imagine she's sitting in a straight-back chair with some other angels, discussing how the weather is "partly to mostly cloudy" and asking everyone if they'd like a pudding pop.

POTLUCK DINNER

Nothing like a potluck dinner to bring people together over the holidays.

I used to work in a potluck-crazy office. Unfortunately, a couple of my snobby co-workers weren't really into it. I'll never forget a conversation I overhead between them.

"You going to the potluck today?" the man asked.

"No, I wouldn't eat that," the woman said. "I don't trust food brought by other people."

"Me neither," the man agreed. "I don't want to eat that farted-on stuff."

Just then, they turned to see my friend Penny and me standing in the doorway with our green bean casserole and chocolate pie.

"So, you use your secret ingredient this year?" I asked Penny.

"Yep," she replied. "I doubled the farts."

Ah, the holidays.

~Heidi Nieland is a former Southeast Missourian reporter who lives in Pensacola, Fla.