Christmas 2023

 Christmas Eve

Got up at 5am and found my phone blowing up with messages in the family chat. A drunk had plowed through my grandpa’s fence, a tree, the steel walkway railing, and into the side of the house where my aunt was sleeping (she’s caring for him). There is a tree trunk embedded in the wall where her head would have been if they hadn’t moved the bed to the other side of the room not long ago. The drunk behind the wheel was lucky he was alive, lucky both my aunt and her husband are ER nurses, and lucky that my uncle didn’t finish the job for him. If the tree hadn’t slowed him down, he would have taken out my aunt.  

In our family, Christmas Eve is the big feast day. I prepare the biggest prime rib and lamb roasts I can find, cook up a pile of tiny potatoes and carrots, and the next day all the leftovers go into a massive meat pie with puff pastry. I baked the desserts in the morning, then drove up to feed baby Jesus. He came out when he saw me this time, instead of waiting for me to put the food down and leave, so we're making progress. 

My mother came up with Gavin in the afternoon, and the family played card games and drank cider while I finished cooking. The roasts turned out good enough that nobody cared when I unmolded the flan cake and it collapsed and ran everywhere. They ate the cooked part anyway. Call the rest eggnog. 

Oh no

We watched a Doctor Who Christmas special, and my mother slept over on the futon in Zenny's room.

It was a really nice day for everyone except the drunk guy sitting in jail waiting for the courts to open back up.

Christmas Day

The neighbor cats decided to have a big yowling fight in our driveway at 4:55am. I ran outside in my pajamas to chase them up the road and got back into bed just in time for all the kids (even the 21 year old) to come in to wake us up. I put on a sad pot of decaf.

You never know what the stand-out gifts are going to be. This year the most popular presents were a giant beanbag chair that folds out into a lounger, and a remote-controlled fart machine. Leif spent the day laying in the beanbag under a tortilla blanket, pushing Zenny off every time she tried to ooze onto it. He finally opened it up, climbed inside, and zipped it up to his neck. Zenny made fart noises every time he moved.

After breakfast my mother headed home to make Christmas dinner. I drove up to the library again, feeling a bit foolish and thinking about a video on Reddit of old ladies getting arrested for feeding stray cats. I figured if the guy living out of his car by the library can set garbage cans on fire and throw bricks through business windows without getting arrested, I should be okay feeding a cat. When I crouched down to dish up food, the skinny old cat came right to me and started eating before I was done scooping it out. He still looks really bad, but I can't see the individual bumps on his spine anymore.

Dinner was at my mother's place. I made a triple-layer mousse cake because my cousins won't eat fruit or nuts, and my younger aunt came over with the boys and her estranged husband, who only visits for Christmas. I said hi to him, and he ignored me and sat down. Maybe he's still mad about me calling him a hamster 25 years ago. Or maybe he found out he's banned from my house and that's why they're never invited for roast beef on Christmas Eve.

After the meat pie, we lit the plum pudding on fire, and I put the mousse cake down for the kids. My aunt's husband took a bite of the plum pudding and said it was terrible, and I did not kick his plate into his face. Made myself busy in the kitchen cleaning up the dinner dishes. When he was ready to go, he walked out without saying goodbye, and my aunt jumped up to get the boys, thanked my mom for dinner, and hurried after him. One of our better dinners with him, really.

We pulled it off for another year.