Oh, Family Tree...Oh, Family Tree...

Ahh, Christmas.

A time for excessive eating and drinking, Yule Logs and spiked eggnog... a time for remembering those closest to us for what they truly are:

Total fucking lunatics.

Look...there's a reason I don't live in Pittsburgh. Actually, there are about 35. And they all come in the form of some member of my extended family. I won't list them individually, but I'd like to comment on the extended-family-phenonemon as a whole. Please stay with me. This may be a little painful.

First, there is the fact that my grandparents...G-d love em... are 86 years old. That's old. They live in a house three times the size of something they're willing to handle and needless to say have barely the capability to care for. My mother, my aunts, everyone around them is packing them up, sticking the wooden sign on the front lawn and shipping them express mail to "Friendship Village."

My vote? Leave them alone. They want to be in their enormous house for the remainder of their days...let THEM! No one had better tell me when, or to where, I'm moving, especially 60years from now. I feel as though, by then, I'll have formulated some opinions of my own. If you're looking for someone who knows what they want, inquire with the mind of a legally blind 86 year old retired plastics machinery salesman. The man is nearly a century old. He paid his dues and I think we owe him a few golden years of peace. Wouldn't you say?

On Christmas Eve, my very old Grandpa started to look a little delirious sometime after the Steeler's Game and before dinner. They rushed him to the ER when he started complaining of chest pains. 20minutes later, my grandmother returned without him. We stared @ her blankly. "They're keeping him for tests," she said nonchalantly. She doesn't like him very much. She proceded to the beef brisket, and I made a cocktail. The teens were either playing on their laptops or huddled in the garrage shotgunning beers. Everyone said this was our last Christmas in the house...as they've been saying every year of my life.

Today was different. A batch of drunken, emotionally crippled, politically driven, religious (Catholic) fanatics. A far cry from aunts pondering over their twice baked potatoes as to whether or not Grandfather was sure to perish via an unknown aerterial condition or simply dying of a "broken heart." No. Today the Dewars was flowing. And the brothers of my father who used to so graciously claim that I was a bratty nuissance, have spawned some bratty nuisances of their own. And are somewhat worse for the wear, might I add.

Those of you who know me well (@ all...) know that children are not a soft spot. Quite the contrary. I hate kids. I managed, miraculously and due in no small part to a bottle of Pinot and about five vodka tonics, to hold down some polite, albeit uncomfortable, conversation with my fathers' brothers...all of which despise me, and none of which have any interest whatsoever in my daily trials. Alas...I managed to remain observably socially engaged. But their kids-- quite another story. Their heads could have by all accounts been spinning at a 360, screaming in Latin and projectile vommiting our far too filling Chrismtas dinner, and their parents would quietly have said, "honey, please." Which essentially, is exactly what happened.

They were right in saying you can never go home. And I am old enough to understand that it's me who's changed...not home. It's just terribly sad to realize, as you must at some point, that once upon a time...I found this all to be entirely flawless.

What is it then, about childhood, that guards you from the uncomfortable nuances of reality? That shields you from the light of a strange day? That keeps you safe in the notion that, yes, this is my family. And they are magical. Rather than the freakshow of flawed, alchoholic losers with retched parenting skills that they've become. I too...will someday become an alchoholic, disappointing parent, should I choose the path of least resistance. For even the seemingly normal of my gene-pool (and yes, there are one or two) have subscribed themselves to the roles of "family" that Americana is forever threatening to bestow upon us.

Sometime, somewhere...Christmas got weird. I wish I could say it was my family, or my Christmas that changed. But sadly, I'm a little too old to believe in Santa. And also--it stands to reason-- a little too old to believe in the kind of family we all seem to have as children. No magic here. Just the good old family tree.