Overall, I have to say this was pretty much a bleah Christmas for me and even for my immediate family. It wasn’t bad, no one had anything awful happen to them, no one got pissed at anyone else, but no one seemed particularly embued with festive holiday spirit.
My flight to New Orleans was uneventful. The Orange Alert situation provided a good conversational topic for me to have with various relatives, but for the most part I couldn’t see any of the extra security measures myself. I brought my laptop and was very pleased to be able to watch DVDs in the Austin airport and on the plane from DFW to New Orleans. It seemed weirdly subversive: “I get to watch The Muppet Show while the rest of you have to read or sleep, ha ha!” We’ve established that sometimes I get a kick out of very silly things. My baby brother picked me up at the airport, and he knew exactly what to do. He immediately drove me to get a shrimp po-boy, before we even got to my parents’ house.
(Aside: the food options in airports are never all that great, although the Austin airport is better than most … but the food selections in the American terminals of DFW were unusually atrocious. In case you ever fly through DFW, bear that in mind.)
That was on Tuesday. Tuesday night, I had one of the most frustrating moments of my trip. I tried to use my parents’ dial-up connection with my laptop. The problem wasn’t the slowness of the dial-up connection, it was the shortness of my phone/modem cord and the locations of my parents’ phone jacks. The phone jack in my bedroom didn’t work. My mom suggested I use the kitchen phone jack, but this meant I was stuck on a kitchen chair, too far away from the kitchen table, with the laptop on my lap and my toes pointed so it wouldn’t slide down my lap. My mom hovered around the kitchen, making stuff for Christmas Eve, and humming tunelessly. Considering I’d had about three hours of sleep the night before, I behaved remarkably well. I decided to phone my boyfriend from my bedroom instead of using IM, disconnected the laptop, and went to bed. I figured I could always sneak over to PJ’s, the coffeehouse with wonderful free wireless, sometime on Wednesday.
But no. Christmas Eve is always frantic at my parents’ house because they have a party that night and all the presents must be wrapped, food prepared, etc. by mid-afternoon so everyone can get ready to go to Christmas Eve Mass at 4 pm. I had lunch with my dad and one of his friends at their country club, where my baby brother works as a waiter. He did a fine job with our table, but apparently the country club is missing a head chef right now and the assistant chef on duty didn’t know how to make salads properly. No, seriously. I ordered a chopped salad and it … wasn’t chopped. It wasn’t a bad salad, but I could only eat so much iceberg lettuce.
I have never had a good meal at that country club. My family swears that they have excellent meals there all the time and either a) I have the amazingly bad luck of going there on the very few “off days” or b) I am a very very picky person about food. I concede a certain amount of truth in b) but I also suspect c) my parents are slowly losing their taste buds as they get older, and they’d rather eat somewhere convenient than somewhere with good cuisine.
We arrived at church too late for us all to sit together. My dad tries to get us all to the church early on Christmas Eve but it never works. I think some people must get there an hour or more in advance, anyway. Someone associated with the church apparently thought it was a good idea to have a big pro-life poster on an easel right by the entrance, one of those lurid pictures of a fetus in the womb with assurances that This Is A Human Being and Killing It Is Wrong. I told myself just to pretend I hadn’t seen it and concentrated on looking at the woodwork that my dad did for the church this year. He helped build some pillars and alcoves and things in a very pretty dark wood, and as he kept saying, it made the church look a lot less like a gym (or as I thought, less like a holdover from the Seventies).
The happy-fetus-on-display made me worry a bit that this would be one of those Masses where the priest decides to challenge all of those people who only attend Mass a couple of times a year, by ranting about controversial subjects. Fortunately this wasn’t the case. Even if it had been, I mightn’t have noticed because I spent a lot of the time in church trying to keep my niece quiet and occupied. She finally fell asleep on my sister, thankfully.
After church, we rushed home because my brother’s family was supposed to be there shortly thereafter so that we could all open presents together before the bigger party started. We didn’t realize that they would wait until my nephew finished his nap, so we sat around wondering where the hell they were for about 40 minutes, picking at ham and eating all the salsa my mom intended for the party. When my brother’s family appeared at last, we all gathered on the sun porch, where the tree and the presents were, to open gifts. It turned out that the sun porch was really too crowded because you couldn’t see what everyone else was opening and a couple of small things got lost (Barbie shoes, mostly) or temporarily misplaced. My mom swears that next year she is getting a very thin tree, maybe even a fake one, and putting it in the den where we will all have a lot more room.
Most of the presents that I gave people were things they’d asked for, and vice versa, so there weren’t a lot of surprises. For me, the high point was giving my baby brother a copy of Joe Bob Briggs’ book Profoundly Disturbing with an personal inscription in the front. He’s awful to shop for, because he asks for DVDs and then buys them himself because he can’t wait. I’ve learned that the best thing is to either buy him DVDs that he doesn’t know about but that I think he will enjoy (I gave him The Hidden Fortress earlier this year) or to give him non-DVD film stuff like books. Anyway, he absolutely did not expect me to give him a book that Joe Bob Briggs had signed with my brother’s own name, and he went completely bananas. That was really my favorite gift that I gave this year.
(He gave me the “Boomstick Edition” DVD of Army of Darkness. What a sweet kid. I was quite pleased.)
I got about a half-dozen DVDs, a book or two, and some other nice presents. I particularly liked a little pendant my mom found for me when she went to Asheville earlier this year.
Shortly after we cleaned up all the gift wrap and put away the presents, the doorbell rang and guests started arriving. My grandparents, my great-aunt and uncle and their kids, my other great-aunt (their sister, the one who reminds me of Shirley MacLaine in Guarding Tess) from Mississippi and one of her sons. My aunt the nun and her “entourage” of other old friends of hers whom we usually see during the holidays. Another aunt and uncle who live on this side of the lake. A few other people whom I can’t recall at the moment. My parents used to have a huge Christmas Eve open house, and they’ve decreased it considerably over the years, but it’s still a housefull of people with whom I have to be at least somewhat social. It’s so handy to have a three-year-old around, like my niece, because you can chase her around and help her open her presents and play with her new toys, and hardly have to make small talk with anyone.
One of the big conversational pieces of this Christmas Eve was the cell phone that my mom and her sister gave my grandparents for Christmas. My mom took great pains to find a phone that was easy to use, that had large type in its display window, and so forth. My baby brother programmed lots of family phone numbers into the phone, and I went through the list of possible ring tones and found one that played “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” After we gave them the phone, my aunt in Alabama phoned them on it. My grandfather obviously liked the phone, and you could see he would enjoy tinkering with a new gadget. My grandmother didn’t even want to touch it. When we called it the next day to talk to my grandfather, and he’d left it at home while he ran an errand, my grandmother wouldn’t answer it or deal with it but figured it must be my parents, so she immediately called their house. My baby brother was home and tried to tell her how to answer the phone, but she said it sounded much too difficult for her. Whaaaaatever.
Despite my grandmother’s recitations about her ever-failing health, my grandparents were the last to leave on Christmas Eve. Plus, my grandmother swore that they were forgetting some of her presents, even though my sister insisted that these gifts had been packed in their car, and we all spent another 15 minutes or so looking under sofas and in various rooms for the gifts. My grandmother finally agreed to leave without the presents, then of course they got home and found them in the back seat of the car.
I was edgy and exhausted and I wanted to go to bed. But no, my mom said we had to clean up all of the party food and dishes first. Fortunately, my niece was being very fussy and finally fell asleep on top of me in an easy chair. I couldn’t reach the TV remote, so I was forced to tolerate a very bizarre animated show about St. Nicholas and the Forest Fairies, realizing that my niece didn’t have on a Pull-Up and could pee on me at any moment. Still, I got to sit down and my mom’s cell phone was nearby, so I called my boyfriend. He strongly advised that I go to bed, and I agreed.
But after we forced a Pull-Up on my niece and put her in a bed, we still had to fill the Christmas stockings. My mom forgot to buy stuff for the stockings this year, and what with all that calendar chaos, I hadn’t had time. Luckily my sister had brought some bags of Dove chocolates and a few other cute things for the stockings. I think that next year, either we should stop having stockings for the grown-ups, or we could draw names and each of us would be responsible for filling one stocking. It’s become pretty rote and unenjoyable the way it is now.
It was 1 am by the time I fell asleep. I had somehow developed a sore throat and felt a little congested, but maybe I just needed some rest. I could only hope that my niece would sleep at least until 7 am.