I hope everyone got what they wanted for Christmas.

I got everything I deserved and not a bit more.

Sometimes I wonder what I could have gotten that I don’t already have that I need. I have a great number of pants and shirts, though I constantly seem to wear out socks.

Got 12 new pair this Christmas. And fishing and hunting stuff, so much that I have never opened some of it. I think I will start giving most of it to other folks as when I die my wife will not know what to do with it and may just toss it in the refuse pile.

During the week of Christmas there were a number of visitors to Bainbridge and Decatur County. In to see relatives, both inlaws and outlaws.

Hunting was enjoyed by a great many of the visitors as well as locals keeping the woods populated with more than deer. And luckily there were a few that took that buck, but more that were satisfied with an antlerless deer to grace the dinner table with. It is nice to take that 200-pound-plus buck with the huge rack and the big feet, but when it comes dinner time a fellow can starve to death trying to digest feet and horns.

That first year doe that you or your son took will make your stomach feel much better than the big buck. That almost-grown doe that hasn’t had a fawn is something to behold. Tasty.

Years ago when I was much younger and not married, we camped out a lot during the deer season, most especially on the cooler nights and sometimes a couple of weeks at a time.

I was with Jesse camping one weekend. We sat around the camp fire eating what we called doe stew. It wasn’t made with a doe deer because there was no doe season at that time. We just called it that.

We ate and ate until we couldn’t hold anymore and just kept on eating until it came back up.

One of us would crawl away from the fire and a little while later the other one would.  That stuff was good.

Another good meal was some doves we killed. We had about 20 doves late one afternoon. We dressed then and put them in a pot of water on a wood stove in the cabin. We fired that rascal up and went for a ride that lasted half the night.

We had really forgotten about the doves. When we returned and saw the dove pot on the stove, we decided that the hamburger we had gotten in town was a good idea. I think ole Jess was the first to try the doves and said that they were some kind of good. It didn’t take us long to rip the breast out of those 20 doves and devour them. Those open fire and stove-top meals were excellent and something I will never forget.

Later in life some of the better meals we had were cubed deer steak cooked in a fish cooker at the cabin and sucker sides also cooked in a fish cooker on the river bank.

French fries and swamp gravy to go with the sucker sides can do its part in making someone fat, so the deer steak help do its part to control the getting fat as it is extremely lean meat.

At the age I am now, most of these food exploits are just memories.

My doctors had rather I not partake of most of the good food I have had in my past. Except for the doe stew, most of it was fried, even the doves are fried and still good.

Cooked in water may be better for a person, but this is the South where most everything is fried. Hell for a southerner would be for everything to be baked or broiled.

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and are looking forward to a great New Year.

Now that the holidays are drawing to a close, I can’t wait for the spring to arrive and we get heavy into the spring fishing season. If plenty of water helps make it better, we should be in store for an unmatched spring as we have had plenty of water and are surely to have more than we want the next few weeks.