The Worst Christmas In my Life
I should have known the relationship was doomed when I went home with her for Christmas.
Her initals are RJW and we will call her RJ for this tale. It was a doomed holiday to start with but two days spent with her parents sends my nerves in search of Xanex.
I had broken up with my lover of 5 years, for her, and it had been a rocky few month to start with anyway. Her parents live in a ho-dunk tiny town in California, near a military base. So, Christmas Eve we arrive in the afternoon and I am making small talk with her mother, who is all too strange to describe in the first place. I am looking around the house FULL of garage sale "finds", of which she is very proud. There is no tree or decorations to speak of around the house to indicate the holiday . Thinking they were a family that decorated on Christmas Eve as a part of the tradition I didn't think much about it until her Mom said, "Oh we decided it wasn't worth the effort". (This should have been another clue. I am SO dense.) Presents were piled in a corner where a tree might have been.
Apparently the biggest things to do is to go the Elks Lodge. About 5PM we were bundled off for a buffet dinner at the Elke Lodge. This was back when you could still smoke indoors in public buildings. The bar was full of smoke, people and a buffet with little if any food left on it. A sense of overwhelming sadness and dread began t rise in me beginning at my toes. The dread was making its way up my spine when it donned on me the way to get through this event was time to drink, heavily. Now, her parents didn't offer to buy us drinks, or even dinner for that fact, and I had very little money with me. So I begged off eating and got down to the business of getting as smashed as I could on what i could afford.
The rest of the holiday became a blurr after that. The sadness put a film on my eyes I could barely blink away. RJ's little brother and sister made the time fairly tolerable. At least they were a bit of a distraction. Dinner came around on Christmas day and it was treated with about as much ceremony as handing out burges from McDonalds. If I remember it was either spaghetti or ham sandwichs, I have blocked it from my mind. Her mother thought it trendy to collect her plates from mismatched sets she would collect at garage sales. It may have been charming on any other day in my life but on this day it felt like I was eating off melmac at the shelter. Class was not something that was inbred in her at any point in time.
Climbing in to our car and driving away gave me a relief that could only be matched, I imagine, by finaly passing a child out of ones body after 19 hours of hard labor.
To say the least I never repeated that event. Had NO desire reenact any part of that event.
Her initals are RJW and we will call her RJ for this tale. It was a doomed holiday to start with but two days spent with her parents sends my nerves in search of Xanex.
I had broken up with my lover of 5 years, for her, and it had been a rocky few month to start with anyway. Her parents live in a ho-dunk tiny town in California, near a military base. So, Christmas Eve we arrive in the afternoon and I am making small talk with her mother, who is all too strange to describe in the first place. I am looking around the house FULL of garage sale "finds", of which she is very proud. There is no tree or decorations to speak of around the house to indicate the holiday . Thinking they were a family that decorated on Christmas Eve as a part of the tradition I didn't think much about it until her Mom said, "Oh we decided it wasn't worth the effort". (This should have been another clue. I am SO dense.) Presents were piled in a corner where a tree might have been.
Apparently the biggest things to do is to go the Elks Lodge. About 5PM we were bundled off for a buffet dinner at the Elke Lodge. This was back when you could still smoke indoors in public buildings. The bar was full of smoke, people and a buffet with little if any food left on it. A sense of overwhelming sadness and dread began t rise in me beginning at my toes. The dread was making its way up my spine when it donned on me the way to get through this event was time to drink, heavily. Now, her parents didn't offer to buy us drinks, or even dinner for that fact, and I had very little money with me. So I begged off eating and got down to the business of getting as smashed as I could on what i could afford.
The rest of the holiday became a blurr after that. The sadness put a film on my eyes I could barely blink away. RJ's little brother and sister made the time fairly tolerable. At least they were a bit of a distraction. Dinner came around on Christmas day and it was treated with about as much ceremony as handing out burges from McDonalds. If I remember it was either spaghetti or ham sandwichs, I have blocked it from my mind. Her mother thought it trendy to collect her plates from mismatched sets she would collect at garage sales. It may have been charming on any other day in my life but on this day it felt like I was eating off melmac at the shelter. Class was not something that was inbred in her at any point in time.
Climbing in to our car and driving away gave me a relief that could only be matched, I imagine, by finaly passing a child out of ones body after 19 hours of hard labor.
To say the least I never repeated that event. Had NO desire reenact any part of that event.