Free The Redneck Guide to Raisin' Children by Annie Smith

your kid to school wearing colored socks with fancy patterns, you’re just asking for him to get ridiculed. You might as well put big yellow clown shoes on him.
    The only time rednecks wear black socks is when they’ve got on white shoes. We’re big on “contrast.”
    Neckties —No self-respecting redneck young’un would ever own a necktie. If they need one for a wedding or some such nonsense, send ’em down the street to borrow one. Or slap a curtain sash around their neck and cut it to the proper length.
    Night of the Living T-shirt
    When it’s warm, redneck kids like to sleep buck-naked until they’re maybe ten years old. And when they need something to wear at night in winter, there’s no need to blow a wad on fancy name brand pajamas or nightgowns.
    Your old T-shirts will do just fine. If your potbelly or bosom stretched them out a bit, so much the better.
    Rufus McKinney’s potbelly is so big he can stand in two zip codes at once, and young teenagers go wild over his T-shirts. Sheriff Gardner says they’ve got a street value of one hundred fifty dollars each.
    â€™Course, they’ve got to be washed six or seven times because they’re so dirty. And the Lord only knows what little invisible critters might be living on ’em. We’ve heard that when Rufus takes off a T-shirt at night, it crawls all by itself into the closet.
    Look around malls and streets these days and you’ll see that kids love the “baggy” look. They don’t even realize that rednecks have been wearing baggy ripped clothes since the beginning of time.
    We were “grungy” when “grungy” wasn’t cool.
    Give your older boys pocket T-shirts so they’ll have a place to keep their Marlboros. If the T-shirts don’t have pockets, show them how to roll up the cigarette pack in the left sleeve.
    If you ain’t got any extra T-shirts, toddle down to a Goodwill or Salvation Army thrift shop and buy a bunch for a quarter apiece.
    Don’t be embarrassed to buy secondhand clothes. We’ve heard of people paying fifty dollars for a pair of prewashed jeans, which is pretty dumb. It makes more sense to let the first owner prewash the jeans, then later you can buy them at a thrift shop for two bucks.
    Mind-boggling treasures can be found tucked away in flea markets and secondhand stores. We make the rounds about once a month, and it never ceases to amaze us what precious things people throw away.
    Last week we bought a genuine Little Jimmy Dickens—1995 World Tour T-shirt for a dime, and you could barely see the ketchup and mustard stains on it.
    Our girl Betty Jean grew up sleeping in a See Rock City—Atop Lookout Mountain T-shirt that she still owns to this day. She’s got it framed and hanging on her bedroom wall, just above the yellow lava lamp she’s had since the sixties.
    As for our son Lonnie, his favorite bedtime T-shirt is one he found lying in the middle of Old Muskrat Road four miles outside of town.
    It says Lonnie’s Hubcap Heaven and has a drawing of St. Peter with a smiley hubcap face, welcoming two flattened hubcaps at the pearly gates.
    Buying Brand-New Duds
    We’ve got so many stringbean boys in our town that the local 7-Eleven opened a Tall and Skinny clothing section. We hope this idea catches on nationwide so all parents can save on new garb.
    Wherever you shop, never take the price tag off a shirt or pair of jeans until you’re absolutely sure your young’un will keep it. If the shirt gets too tight after a few washings, or the jeans chafe a kid’s crotch, you’ll need the tag to return it.
    Of course, this means you’ll have to wash these clothes by hand while holding the tag above the water. But that’s better than losing money.
    Why do you think Minnie Pearl kept the price tag on her hat for years? It’s because she planned on returning it someday. (Hopefully there’s a