Bah, Humbug

[gilee7]

It's almost seven in the morning on Christmas Day and here I am updating my livejournal. I haven't been asleep. The rain is falling in waves outside, slamming against the windows. The trees are ripping in the wind. I can hear my mom's windchimes dancing violently. In a couple hours my parents will awake and we'll all open presents. My mom will take

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[jdroa]

Nowadays they're kind of quiet and withdrawn, whereas in those old VHS tapes they were the life of the party. Marriages have fallen apart. People have had kids and now seem perpetually stressed. The laughter is gone. Money is tight. I don't think anyone actually has fun at the Christmas get-togethers anymore. We're all just going the motions, going through the same routine, living out our miserable lives. Here, here. This paragraph sounded about right, reflected my family situation. It's the most depressing paragraph in this entry, well, maybe second most depressing next to the one about your niece.

I can only remember having three good Christmases, and two out of three, ironically, were recent because I spent them away from home. My one good Christmas was when I was seven-going-on-eight years old. Two out of three of my brothers had not arrived into my life yet; it was also four months before we lost our house and had to live in a one bedroom apartment (and then my two brothers arrived). It was also before my mother found out about my father's on-going affair, topped off with the loss of his job and him flocking off to the casinos. It was the Christmas I received my first bike, half-purchased with allowance, Christmas, and birthday money I had saved up for four years (two days later it was stolen, rofl). On that particular Christmas, we had a very big gathering even though my family couldn't afford very much. Everyone brought food and all us kids were running around. There wasn't a fight that evening to break up the celebration, not like the subsequent Christmases, which got smaller every year, and it wasn't like the previous Christmases either where my father was away on business or whatever. We sang and I remember my aunt and uncle dancing slowly with their eyes closed and the rest of the family was hooting and hollering.

This Christmas I spent at work. It was a twelve hour shift, and my knee is still fucked up from this past Saturday so it was hell on my feet. I was sleep-deprived; I read your reviews and they were the first and possibly only Christmas present I will get (Moon "didn't know what to get" and so he didn't get me anything at all. >_>), and I stayed up watching Brothers, which sucked. Haha. I hobbled to work groggy and sort of grumpy, too, and spent most of the day watching other families wander aimlessly through Kodak Theater with their kids, fathers with donning Santa hats, helping their wives push baby carriages. Confused tourists possibly celebrating a commercialized American Christmas for the first time. The Exhibit was one of the only things open in Kodak on Christmas, and so I snapped photos of who knows how many families at green screen (an influx of 500 people showed up when the day before only 30 showed). I hobbled on my crutch up and down the stairs so many times that my knee gave out and I couldn't stand anymore. It was too cold outside to go eat. I arrived home to a cold, dark, and empty house. The owners were away visiting relatives, and even the couple who lives in the big bed room whose families are in different countries were out at 10pm, probably celebrating Christmas over an intimate dinner.

Despite how late it was, I decided to cook a four-course meal for four. I cooked until three this morning. Haven't slept yet, going to hobble to my last day of work at ten. I thought of dropping off my mother food (her job is a 24-hour one because she works with mentally handicapped persons in a home), and saving some chicken for my brother who drove out to Arizona to get his dad to see his family for probably the last time (falling apart; looks like a skeleton now). I have gotten a buttload of presents for them and for Moon and some of my other friends, but haven't been able to deliver them because of my knee injury and work work work. I didn't realize until this morning that I was trying to celebrate Christmas.