A Family Christmas
By Shel Desormeaux

Over Christmas, Michelle and I took to ranking out each other’s mom. It’s desperately juvenile, but holy shit, is it fun!

Par example...

We stood outside smoking on Christmas night, and man alive, was it bitterly cold.  But we stood there laughing and shivering, picking on each other relentlessly.

“You’re such a fucking dork, man.”
“Bugger off. I should kick the shit outta you.”
“Pffft. I’ll kick your MOM, man.”  Pause. “I’ll BUGGER your mom.”

And we’d double over and snort puffs of freezing mirth into the shadows cast by the porch light.

Yeah. It’s immature. And weird, because Michelle’s my youngest sister, so a) we share a mom, and b) we’re offering to bugger our Mom.  It’s just sick.  Know what’s sicker? My mom’s standing under the porch light with us, puffing away on a cigarette, snickering, trying not to, but hey. She knows funny, that woman. So she laughs.

It’s better than many Christmases past, that’s for sure. Invariably, someone in the family would get drunk and alienate the rest of the crew (piss off, we’re French Canadian). Then there was the Christmas my dad and I fought over the color of the gravy. I preferred the whitish, sawmill-type gravy you only ever see now at hospitals and the Cracker Barrel. He wanted to make the darker, richer stuff, which I now would rather eat anyway. Both of us got pissed off, and then stomped off to different rooms.  Over gravy.

But there was a Christmas Eve or two that saw us drink and not throw things. Like the year I was probably not of legal age but Dad made me several whiskey sours anyway. And then... there were others. I know there were. I haven’t always drunk.  Dad wasn’t making me pina coladas the night before I got a Cabbage Patch Doll or something.  So there were piles of ‘em, there had to be.

Not my point.

My immediate family is filled with sensitive, hotheaded, passionate, indulgent people.  We managed to channel our usual yuletide yelping into the mass consumption of homemade fudge. It was awesome. No one got tanked. No one accused anyone of overcooking anything on purpose. We’re older. We’re wiser. We’re better people. With age comes a better appreciation of each other and the things that make us unique, which isn’t a lot. We’re a hell of a lot more alike than we want to admit. And that’s quite all right, I think, for all of us. It had better be, because there’s nothing we can do about it.

Heh. Michelle. I’ll do your MOM.

Comments? Click here to let us know what you think.

Or, click below:

Visitors from the US:

Visitors from Canada: