Holy Day Of Obligation
Everyone I'm sure will be happy to know that I've (mostly) survived another Christmas. I've made huge strides toward my goal of contracting adult-onset type 2 diabetes by consuming enough refined white sugar (none of that mongrel brown stuff) to fuel a colony of ants for three years. Chocolate, cookies, cakes, pies, no confection was safe in a room alone of me. I am to sweets what Michael Jackson is to eleven year old boys.

OK, I'm obviously exhausted if I'm resorting to tired Michael Jackson jokes.

I may have mentioned this before, but my mom is the second of twelve good Catholic children. None of them actually go to church anymore, but that's really beside the point. The point is that there are twelve of them. And many of them live local.

It's traditional that as many of us as can make it all congregate at the same place for Christmas Eve. For the last 10-plus years we've been going to my aunt's house in Newport Coast. It's on the side of a hill less than a mile from the ocean. As everyone knows, constant exposure to salt ocean air rots the human brain quickly and irrevocably so that people so affected have been known to buy clothes for their human-fist-sized dogs, pay immigrant women money to wax all the hair off their bodies and then will lay in indoor tanning beds on sunny June days.

As debilitating as that can be, this is never the main problem. Our solid white-trash stock generally cancels out any tendencies toward dandy-ism. None of us would make a good Jane Austen villain.

Normally the problems we have are a result of the sheer volume of personalities. There were over 50 people this year, a light-to-moderate turn-out. The year-long passive agression tends generally (and with a little yuletide nudge from whatever is spiking the egg nog this year) to slip briefly into active agression, which foments brooding, which foments segregation into "camps"--for or against the aggrievors and the aggrieved--which only crystallizes the old clique-ishness seething below the unifying (and utterly false) holiday spirit.

In the midst of the chaos and occasional cold stares, there's always somewhere to hide, somewhere I can find a place to sit and reflect, to ponder how best to make real my one real Christmas Eve wish: not to get stuck playing Santa Claus.

Someone always has to play Santa Claus as he inexplicably finds time at the height of his Busy Season to chat with all of us and distribute some under-$10 baubles. The red suit and beard are smelly, dingy, not-at-all hygienic looking by now. I congratulate myself on my success in avoiding the costume; 30 years and counting. I have confidence my streak will continue unbroken next year as the women in our family continue to reach adulthood and then marry, dragging unsuspecting suckers into our brood, eager to suck up to the faceless mass of Christmas sneering that is My Mother's Side Of The Family. They only make that mistake once.

So we survived that. Then Christmas Day mass at our church (less fun than it sounds), then all day with the in-laws (my wife has one brother, who has one kid... amateurs, all of them). They bought an X-Box this year to amuse my kids, which meant a full day of car-racing and monster slaying while my kids watched, slow tears running down their cheeks waiting for daddy to get done "showing" them how to play.

Tomorrow we're off to my wife's friend's new house out in Whittier (LA County, far less culturally significant than it sounds) and then Christmas will officially be over. All I really got this year was The Return of the King DVD and 15-20 lbs. of extra Pops. What more could any human want?

Like political cycles, the next holiday cycle begins as soon as the last one ends. I begin my quest to lose my extra weight just in time for next Halloween, when I re-initiate the gain. With any luck, I'll be dead by 40.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.75


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 7:14 PM