So this is christmas: extended remix
7 January 2008Remember, like, forever ago when it was Christmas? Yeah, me too. Barely. I didn’t want to write about it until I had visual aids, and in order to do that I somehow decided that I first needed to caption the 142 pictures I took over the holiday, even though there are only so many ways to say “here’s a picture of my brother’s baby, whom I love and am madly obsessed with.” Going through these made me really long for those Christmases in high school where Danny and Erin and I would ditch everyone to drive around putting lawn reindeer in compromising positions on our neighbor’s lawns. But even without the manipulation of whimsical holiday animals, we managed to have a good time:
I have a version of this picture every year– my dad and his favorite ornament, creatively named “the fuzzy guy.” This year there was a good 7 minute panic as Dad clawed through the shirt box that holds all of the ornaments from when we were little (lots of popsicle stick framed class pictures with pipe cleaner hangers. When I first typed that I wrote out “popstickle” and couldn’t figure out why it didn’t look right. Kind of like how in a recent game of Scrabble I kept lining up my letters STICL and going “isn’t that a word? Doesn’t that spell something?” until someone had to tell me that I was just obsessively trying to spell my own name. Self absorbed, party of one, your table is ready) asking if we had lost the fuzzy guy and my brothers and I hi-LARIOUSLY asked things like “Hey, what’s Jack eating? Is the dog allowed to have yarn as a snack?” Ho Ho Ho, so funny. We all have our favorite ornaments (I go back and forth between the many Baby’s First Christmas ones I have where my name is spelled incorrectly. Thanks, Grandma!), including Peej’s:
Bert from Sesame Street, Peej’s eyebrow twin. Peej also continued in his Christmas tradition of making the Bert ornament and the Ernie ornament make out brazenly in front of all the other ornaments, even the conservative republican ones.
This will come as a shock to no one– my father is obsessed with my brother’s baby. I mean really, how can you not be, but still. In all the pictures I took of Meg, the vast majority show my dad super gluing himself to her so that he never has to be more than a few inches away at any time. Then someone else tries to hold her and his eyes turn red and he totally Hulks out. It’s pretty adorable.
There’s a near-exact version of this picture with my dad and baby cristin in this exact position (I’m wearing my christening gown and my dad has a vague look of “so you’re telling me I’m going to have to pay for this one to go to college, and once she gets out she’ll still have days where she calls out to her bosses from her cube “So is ‘held’ spelled ‘h-e-l-d? Or is it ‘h-e-a-l-d?’ or is that not a word? I’m having some trouble with this outlook meeting request”) and I am very impressed with myself that I don’t have issues about being replaced by the baby in her new capacity as Only Little Girl. No issues at all. None whatsoever. Nor do I have a lurking feeling that by the time I get around to having kids all of my parents will be like “but we already HAVE grandkids. What else you got?” When you do as many Christmases per year as my brothers and I do, you get to the point where you’re kind of doing sthick at all times. By the last round, we should have a two drink minimum because our routines are so polished. By the end of this Christmas, whenever there was a lull in the baby conversation, Bud would bust out “Cristin’s a little worried that no one’s going to love any of her kids by the time they show up.” And then I would tell the story about how I tried to express these feelings of concern to my mom, and she went “I know. When Bud was born, I thought I would never love anyone else as much as I loved him.” And then she paused just long enough for me to say “If that’s the end of that story, then that’s pretty crappy of you,” but luckily she went on to say “And then you were born, and I thought- Wow! So much love!” Which made me feel a little bit better. (Sorry, peej, I didn’t think to check and make sure she loved you when you were born, too. But I’m fairly convinced she did/ does).
Anyway, that picture is my favorite picture of my dad and I (taken my Aunt Roe, who took enough pictures of us as small people that Bud grew up calling any camera he saw a Cheese-Roe-Roe, in some linguistically fascinating play on words) and I need someone in my family to make me a copy of it before I get famous and you sell it on ebay and I have to buy back the original at like 400 times its actual value.
Part of my christmas present to Meg was a tiny awesome sweater (tininess almost always makes things awesomer– like how Jordan bought me a hoodie for my rrrPod– hello, awesome) and as I was picking it out I came up with a rule I hope to follow forever– that I’ll never buy her any clothing that I wouldn’t wear myself, if it came in my size. I hope this keeps me from picking out any kind of onesie that has HOTTIE written across it in sparkles, or anything sold here,particularly the Hooters Girl In Training onesie. (Way to aim high, parents of america). Occasionally the rule mutates into my coveting the outfits being rocked by a 5 month old. Like this one.
Tiny hats are ALMOST as great as tiny socks. Tiny socks are the only reason I go to office baby showers. Seriously.
Starting in high school (I think), Older Brother Bud came up with the “tradition” of doing all of his holiday shopping on christmas eve. Now that he’s married, it’s more of a tradition of having his wife do all the shopping for him. Bud claims to be a Christmas Eve Mall Shopping Ninja, and that he has plans and techniques that allow him to get in and out with relative ease and without wanting to kill anyone. These techniques almost worked for me when the three of us went to the Garden State Plaza on christmas eve morning, but about two hours in I hit the wall in a big way. I wound up curling up in a ball on a bed in Macy’s and hoping to wake up in 2008 while Bud cheerfully hunted down the perfect ceramic santa. It had to be done because the three of us hadn’t bought anything for each other, and this way we could avoid just handing one another cash on christmas morning by standing in Best Buy the day before going “Someone buy me Labrynth on DVD because I don’t have it yet.” Also, I got to have moments like this one:
“Anyone see where that giant vampire went to?” ~Peej
Of all the good things I’ve ever said about my brothers, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten into how good natured they are. They don’t seem to have bad moods. They leave all of that up to their sister.
See, they even like being at Wendy’s.
They also really like challenging one another to fooseball tournaments where they play for our mother’s love. Like a medieval jousting tournament, only with skewered little men with no arms. We thought this year was going to be different because Bud’s “office” (what do you call the place navy pilots do their computer work? Office seems too light a term) recently installed a fooseball table (your tax dollars at work) and Bud claims he’s now a ninja at it. I was upstairs for most of this year’s head to head but could hear Bud screaming “Flood gates! Flood gates!” over and over at the top of his lungs, which he later explained was short for “I’m about to open the flood gates of fooseball awesomeness and completely destroy you.”
He didn’t, though. Peej is still Master of the Universe, at least in our Mom’s basement.
And then it was Christmas Eve for real, when we drive to Aunt Kathy’s and then I spend a lot of time trying to eat more cranberry sauce than anyone else on the planet with the exception of my cousin Molly who also got that gene, and Peej puts on a Mr Rogers sweater and bangs out some Christmas tunes for everyone.
At that round of Christmas, I got a fire extinguisher and was totally pumped about it (it had been on my list). If this isn’t a sure sign of aging I don’t know what is. Tomorrow I’m going to go out and get a japanese character tattoo that I can’t interpret just to counteract it.
I slept at my dad’s on Christmas eve, in the room that was my first bedroom before I moved across the hall to a room that’s actually, you know, roomy. But I sleep in the little room when I come home now, since our old dog spent the years after I left my room for college doing gross things the mattress/ pillow that were there at the time and I never got over it. Also, the dimensions are roughly those of a normal sized bathroom, so it reminds me of my apartment and makes me feel right at home. And when you wake up on Christmas morning and you want to read something while you wait for your older brother to show up so you can FINALLY get some presents, you have a lot of options, thanks to my Dad:
So THAT’S where my copy of The Origin of Satan went!
After I got done flipping through Church Signs Across America (gripping stuff), Bud & Katie & The Baby showed up so we could Get Down To Business. Which apparently means different things to different people. Like, for my dad, it meant growling whenever anyone else tried to hold the baby. And for me, it meant not showering, and eating enough cinnamon rolls that Bud had the balls to ask “Is that your 4th one?” on one trip back from the kitchen. Yes. Yes, it is. Eff off. And for Bud, it meant dressing in matching jammies with his 5 month old.
Meg is a “morning baby,” perpetually happy before the 11 am hour (must get it from her mother’s side) and spent most of Christmas morning chilling on a blanket on the floor. In her feetsie jammies.
Bud and Katie (read: Katie) put together books for all of Meg’s grandparents of pictures of her, with captions that were narrated by Meg (kind of like how Bud used to blog as Megwhen she was a few weeks old). My dad completely effing lost it looking at this thing. Just could not hold it together to save his life. He had to leave the room to pull himself together, at which point I said to peej “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Dad cry before,” and he immediately responded “God, I wish I could say the same!” Ah, Christmas. I was mostly amused by the fact that two dimensional, non-moving pictures of the baby worked him up into such a state when the baby herself was a mere 3 feet away, doing awesomely cute things like this:
Anyway, in light of this emotional breakdown, I decided that next year I’m making all of my parents a photo album just like the one they got this year of pictures of Meg. Except it’ll be all pictures of everything I did in my 27th year. And it damn well better make everyone cry just as much, even if (ESPECIALLY if) they’re all captioned with such moving prose as “here I am giving the finger to a yankees fan at shea stadium! Here’s the 7th consecutive wedding I wore The Orange Dress to!”
Over at Mom’s house, the present-ing continued. I decided while shopping for the baby that, since she’s not quite at the stage where she can appreciate things like fine cinematic art as well as the rest of us, that presents for her should really be presents for her parents. So I got her Muppet movies.
You’re welcome, Brendan.
Meg generously helped me open many of my presents, included the abovementioned Labrynth DVD (it’s always a Henson Christmas in my world).
Yes, I spent all day in turtle pajama pants, one of my dad’s Tower Club tshirts, and a ramapo college sweatshirt. Gentlemen, the line forms to the left.
And we got the opportunity to take when my mom gave him the Best Present Ever, the box o’ cash.
No one got a fire extinguisher for Christmas over at Mom’s. In fact, just the opposite.
Danny’s got a hot date for New Year’s!
This wasn’t the first year I forgot to bring a grab bag present, but it was the first year that I unintentionally forgot. Usually I protest, ever since the year I put Gummy Butts into the grab bag and mom got mad at me when she unwrapped them. The goal is to bring the worst thing possible. We had a couple of close calls, but I think it’s hard to top the Care Bear’s holiday CD.
Erin hasn’t been this excited since I gave her Ali Lohan’s Christmas CD. (Not kidding).
And that’s a wrap on Christmas.
Complete album here if you need to see 142 pictures of people I’m related to. And really, who doesn’t? Rest assured, I make all the same jokes in the photo captions.
4 Responses to “So this is christmas: extended remix”
January 7th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Was this the fire extinguisher you got? Because I bought it for my brother, as a subtle move-out-of-our-parents’-house-and-don’t-burn-down-your-eventual-apartment’s-kitchen hint, but the jackass returned it. For tools. I think he’s the tool.
January 10th, 2008 at 11:32 am
g’morning – you don’t know me and well i don’t know you, and at this point i dont even remember how i found your blog, but you make me laugh and the pictures of your niece are so freaking cute i have remained a weird lurker – but lurk no more, i was at PB Kids last night on 68th (ish) and 2nd and they have the entire line of PB Kids PIrate birthday party stuff on sale and this includes plastic tumblers with pictures of pirates on the side – i almost purchased them and asked for your address and then realized how entirely weird that would be so instead i urge you to go to PB Kids asap – they are on the right side of the store tucked under the sale stuff.
have a super awesome day.
-Morgan
January 10th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
I love weird lurkers when they serve as pirate scouts for me!
I am so on top of this. Thanks for the tip!!
January 10th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
haha excellent! I felt border line crazy standing in the store last night thinking in my head, oh Cristin would love these…i dont even know Cristin! But they are like 1.39 or something crazy and they had A LOT of the tumblers – godspeed.