So Christmas.
It was a veritable stew of family dysfunction. My family aside, for whom dysfunctional interactions are an art, much like an Obsession by Calvin Klein commercial, the winner for dysfunction is Esteban’s paternal side of the family.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad thing. It’s kind of a Jerry Springer meets It’s a Wonderful Life thing.
The cast:
The Good: that would be Esteban’s Aunt Teresita, his ‘uncle’ Dawid (Teresita’s long term and very cool common law husband), Ward and June, and Esteban and myself.
The Bad: Esteban’s Grandma, who insists that we call her by her first name, Genevieve. She has a bit of a mean streak. Ward went to Vietnam to get away from his mother. But we (cough) love her anyway.
The Ugly: Esteban’s Uncle Rod (Ward’s older brother), Rod’s wife of thirty years, Aunt Letitia (who is an affable, lovable, intelligent, and yet completely averse to confrontation of any sort), and Rod’s mistress, whose name is, I kid you not, the name of an alcohol’ but I’ll give her the pseudonym of Tequila’ which is closer than I really should get to her real name but what the hell.
Yes, you read that right. Rod is married to Letitia, but lives with Tequila, who is this washed out epitome of a used bar fly, smoking three to four packs of cigarettes a day (I’m not making that up, either. She told me that and I thought at first that she was kidding. She buys them off the Internet for $1.75 a pack’ I think from Mexico or something), gambling extensively, and always talks as though she were barking out short orders to a fry cook named Cletus.
And Letitia is ok with this. In fact, Tequila was wearing a Christmas present that she had received from Letitia. If I was Letitia, I would have given Tequila a pre-tied noose, not a cutsey embroidered sweatshirt’. But that’s just me.
An agreement had been made this year’. Between Ward and June and Teresita and Dawid, that we would not be giving Christmas presents this year. That was fine with me, actually. The folks in the ‘Bad’ and ‘Ugly’ segment are also notoriously atrocious gift-givers, usually leaning toward tacky 70’s style crafts and strange flair. One year, I got a lava lamp. Sadly, that was the coolest gift I received from that group that year.
Another year, I got a pantyhose organizer. You know, for all those pantyhose I wear.
And organize.
Last year, Rod and Tequila gifted us with a beer bottle opener on what appeared to be a varnished hunk of plywood, with ‘Open up another Round in Eagle River, Wisconsin’ pasted onto it with black stick-em letters. I actually accidentally said ‘Oh, we’ll have to put that in the garage!’ realizing too late that they had expected me to perhaps hang it in our living room, in the spot of honor’ or perhaps the place for drinking from returnables.
So I shed no tears over the fact that I would not need to fake a joyous expression at receiving another snowman made from empty milk jugs or fugly indescribable ‘What is it?’
Then Rod called everyone and said, ‘Here’s what we’re all going to do’ which meant ‘This is what Tequila and I have decided to do.’. They were going to collect $20 from each of us. For that $20, we would receive $10 worth of lottery tickets. The other $10 would apparently go to a charity of some sort.
What he neglected to say was that Tequila and he had decided this, and then called everyone in the family, acting as though EVERYONE ELSE had decided this already. Everyone felt as though they had to participate because they really had no choice in the matter.
Which pissed me off. Playing the lottery is just the states way of taxing stupidity. Also, I really disliked this manipulation of our funds. If I want to give to charity, which I do, I don’t need to be coerced into doing it.
When we got together yesterday, Tequila handed us our envelopes, each with our names written upon them, while Rod collected $20 from each of us. Inside the envelopes were five lottery tickets and five scratch-off tickets. The lottery tickets were from last Saturday’s drawings. Tequila had kindly included a slip with the winning numbers on it. So does that mean that Tequila had to have KNOWN what the winning numbers were BEFORE she stuffed the envelopes? Why, yes it does! Does it surprise anyone that NO ONE won even a single $1 on those tickets? Not that there was a very high likelihood of that anyway, but still.
What is more, Tequila collected our losing scratch-off tickets, because apparently there’s some kind of second chance thing where you send in losing tickets and possibly win cash that way. So Tequila demanded all of our losing tickets from us. So she could send it in. For herself. Then she announced that ‘they’ had decided that if anyone won anything over $120, then they would have had to split it with everyone. Also, they opened and scratched off the tickets for two people who did not attend, so now those folks get the joy of handing over their $20 without ever even seeing the actual lottery tickets.
God bless us, every one.
The clincher of the gathering was that Rod and Tequila were going to take care of sending the additional money to charity. Whatever.
The thing that really annoyed me was not the forced gambling on the day baby Jesus was born, not the raspy, nicotine addled trailer trash voice rambling about her ‘daytime stories’, not even how she immediately claims the best chair in the most prominent place for herself and ensconces herself like she’s the best Bingo Caller in the Holler. It wasn’t even her fuzzy slippers which were red, white, and blue adorned with a flag of glitter (because THAT will honor those lost on September 11th’ stomping around in flag slippers) undoubtedly setting her back at least $3.99 at Family Dollar.
No. I could live with that.
The thing that bothers me is that she is always telling me to smile.
‘Weetabix!’ She’ll bark. ‘Smile!’
And she says it like she was ordering a double shot of lower rail whiskey or something.
It’s not even a bark. It’s more of a bray. She brays at me.
‘Smile!’ And then she’ll demonstrate to me what I should be doing, exposing her mouth full of yellow Chiclets.
‘You look so sober!’ She said when I just stared at her in disbelief.
Somber’ I thought to myself You ignorant piece of road kill but I suppose sober worked too, since I wasn’t actually imbibing any spirits, something she is undoubtedly unaccustomed to in her own Very Trailer Christmas experiences.
So then I must smile at her. Or she’ll keep braying like some kind of Drill Sergeant of Nascar Rallies or whatnot.
So we fled from that family gathering to my family, who is dysfunctional, but in a repressed Lutheran ‘My Jello salad is better than your Jello salad’ kind of way, with its petty little barbs said with smiling faces. Not in a ‘Ma! The baby’s hogging all the smokes’ kind of way.
Basically, my Mafia Grandma and Aunt Drusilla were evidently pissed at me for showing up late because we’d been at the Lottery Of Ill Repute Christmas Extravaganza. And then Aunt Drusilla was pissed because I gave Abby a present after waiting for an hour for her to stop screwing around in the kitchen. And then we all started handing out presents without her.
We hung around for about two hours. When we left, my M.G. came and gave me a hug. I got a little frightened. I don’t think she’s voluntarily hugged anyone in my lifetime’ at least no one over the age of 12. I started freaking’. Like maybe a guy would be waiting in the backseat of my car with a piano wire, or maybe that I was going to be taken in a boat to be shot and dumped into the lake.
Did I mention that one of my presents from Esteban was the Godfather DVD set? We watched it last night. It was strangely appropriate, with the gambling, booze, and adultery. In fact, I may make it a Christmas tradition.
