All That I Want
Sometimes I honestly don't know what it is that makes people smile a little bit easier and laugh a little bit louder during Christmas. It's not like people these days walk around and think about how it is almost Jesus’ birthday and that alone can put a smile on their faces. I guess it is a combination of things that just make everything so much warmer, even when everything is blanketed with a heavy coat of snow. Even though the holidays have turned into this massive commercial scheme, I feel like people for the most part, will and have always held onto what it really means. I guess it is really hard for me to say that though, because as awesome as Jesus is in theory, it isn't like the 25th is his exact birthday, and it isn't like my beliefs fit into a cookie cutter Christian mold either. I guess to me Christmas has just been a season of seeing family and friends and those traditions that come once a year.
Last night at my aunt Maureen’s was hilarious because just about every person on my dad's side of the family is either deaf or hearing impaired and mixing that with a little alcohol, you get a wonderful combination of sentences and words that everyone thinks each other is saying and it just turns into this hilarious game of who can hear and interpret what each other is saying. When it is written out like that... it sounds kind of sad, but trust me, it is hilarious. I don't think I will ever get sick of hearing my uncle’s war stories either, ever. One of these days I really should learn how to kill someone 26 different ways with that damn mechanical pencil, but for now, I am perfectly content with sitting back with Jocelyn and just letting the hilariousness that is our family unfold in front of us at the dinner table. My uncle started to tell us a story when we were talking about neurology (for some reason) about his Green Beret medic days, but decided to tell us next Christmas when we are both "college girls" whatever the hell that means, he then elaborated by saying that it was a "sexual story". Dear uncle john, I have known the facts of life since age 7 because of my abnormally curious little sister. My sister and I, however, cannot wait until next Christmas. Other than that, it was just a really warm Christmas Eve, in the sense that it makes me so happy to see everyone happy. I got all this fancy tupperware and this grill thing from my aunts and uncles. I know that I need it, and it is practical, but at least it’s like trendy kitchen stuff since my aunt has a temp job with Williams and Sonoma. A few hours after that I made my way over to the r-s's to see fabi, which was of course, enough to make my entire Christmas alone.
Everything this morning went over well except for the fact that Jocelyn and I got my dad what we thought was a really kick ass knee board (its like this metal board that conforms to your leg and it has a clip board and a built in pencil sharpener and a pencil holder and all this other crazy stuff so that it holds your flight info and charts without needing to actually physically hold it) but it turns out that he apparently had a way bamfer one and had to get it from his room to show us, basically, that our gift didn't meet standards. That ruined 40% of my morning, and made my mom pretty upset. The look on her face when he was showing us the one that he already had was just pure disdain. I was pretty pissed, but it doesn’t matter, it's not important. After that we all got cleaned up for my family to come over. Mike came over for dinner too and we were his surrogate family for Christmas. My dad thought that he was the funniest person in the room when he asked mike for ID when he was serving the champagne that he brought over, but it's okay because there were enough jokes like that all night to last the coming year. This combination made the kids table significantly louder. Sometimes it is really strange to think about how fast things are changing, but at the same time, how certain things never change at all. The whole day all the TV’s in my house were turned onto the 24 hours of a Christmas story marathon, so the peppered, "I triple dog dare you, daddy's gonna kill ralphie, fuuuuuuuuge, you'll shoot your eye out kid, fa ra ra ra ra's" were a nice touch. It was just a really good classic Christmas, the kind they make movies out of. The kind of Christmas where everyone just wears cute sweaters and sips eggnog by a lit fireplace. It's times like these that I just feel entirely overwhelmed by how lucky I am just to have so many people that mean so much to me in my life. And as incredible as it is, it comes with a subtle vacuous painful tinge at the bottom of my lungs; only because I know that I would not be the same should anything happen to anyone. Augusten Burrough's sums it up perfectly in Magical Thinking when he talks about the extreme pain it is to love someone, way better than I could at 2am. Anyways, after everyone left, Kallie came over for the perfect ending to the perfect Christmas and we painted our nails and watched Sex and the City. I can honestly say that I didn't really get anything material that I really wanted for Christmas, but then again it wasn't like I wanted anything really badly anyways. I can say, however, that within the past 48 hours or so I got to see and spend time with just about every human (respectively) that means the world to me, and that alone is everything, and all that I wanted. It was just the merriest little Christmas you could ever ask for.
Last night at my aunt Maureen’s was hilarious because just about every person on my dad's side of the family is either deaf or hearing impaired and mixing that with a little alcohol, you get a wonderful combination of sentences and words that everyone thinks each other is saying and it just turns into this hilarious game of who can hear and interpret what each other is saying. When it is written out like that... it sounds kind of sad, but trust me, it is hilarious. I don't think I will ever get sick of hearing my uncle’s war stories either, ever. One of these days I really should learn how to kill someone 26 different ways with that damn mechanical pencil, but for now, I am perfectly content with sitting back with Jocelyn and just letting the hilariousness that is our family unfold in front of us at the dinner table. My uncle started to tell us a story when we were talking about neurology (for some reason) about his Green Beret medic days, but decided to tell us next Christmas when we are both "college girls" whatever the hell that means, he then elaborated by saying that it was a "sexual story". Dear uncle john, I have known the facts of life since age 7 because of my abnormally curious little sister. My sister and I, however, cannot wait until next Christmas. Other than that, it was just a really warm Christmas Eve, in the sense that it makes me so happy to see everyone happy. I got all this fancy tupperware and this grill thing from my aunts and uncles. I know that I need it, and it is practical, but at least it’s like trendy kitchen stuff since my aunt has a temp job with Williams and Sonoma. A few hours after that I made my way over to the r-s's to see fabi, which was of course, enough to make my entire Christmas alone.
Everything this morning went over well except for the fact that Jocelyn and I got my dad what we thought was a really kick ass knee board (its like this metal board that conforms to your leg and it has a clip board and a built in pencil sharpener and a pencil holder and all this other crazy stuff so that it holds your flight info and charts without needing to actually physically hold it) but it turns out that he apparently had a way bamfer one and had to get it from his room to show us, basically, that our gift didn't meet standards. That ruined 40% of my morning, and made my mom pretty upset. The look on her face when he was showing us the one that he already had was just pure disdain. I was pretty pissed, but it doesn’t matter, it's not important. After that we all got cleaned up for my family to come over. Mike came over for dinner too and we were his surrogate family for Christmas. My dad thought that he was the funniest person in the room when he asked mike for ID when he was serving the champagne that he brought over, but it's okay because there were enough jokes like that all night to last the coming year. This combination made the kids table significantly louder. Sometimes it is really strange to think about how fast things are changing, but at the same time, how certain things never change at all. The whole day all the TV’s in my house were turned onto the 24 hours of a Christmas story marathon, so the peppered, "I triple dog dare you, daddy's gonna kill ralphie, fuuuuuuuuge, you'll shoot your eye out kid, fa ra ra ra ra's" were a nice touch. It was just a really good classic Christmas, the kind they make movies out of. The kind of Christmas where everyone just wears cute sweaters and sips eggnog by a lit fireplace. It's times like these that I just feel entirely overwhelmed by how lucky I am just to have so many people that mean so much to me in my life. And as incredible as it is, it comes with a subtle vacuous painful tinge at the bottom of my lungs; only because I know that I would not be the same should anything happen to anyone. Augusten Burrough's sums it up perfectly in Magical Thinking when he talks about the extreme pain it is to love someone, way better than I could at 2am. Anyways, after everyone left, Kallie came over for the perfect ending to the perfect Christmas and we painted our nails and watched Sex and the City. I can honestly say that I didn't really get anything material that I really wanted for Christmas, but then again it wasn't like I wanted anything really badly anyways. I can say, however, that within the past 48 hours or so I got to see and spend time with just about every human (respectively) that means the world to me, and that alone is everything, and all that I wanted. It was just the merriest little Christmas you could ever ask for.