So This Is Christmas: 2008
5 January 2009Somewhere along the line, Christmas in my family became less about Jesus and presents and more about drinking and gambling. I’m not complaining–in order to do that I would have to claim to have nothing to do with the shift and that would never hold up in court–as Christmas has become second only to family funeral after-parties in terms of best times to observe Stickles in their natural states, and it’s a hell of a fun ride this way. The week-long coma that follows is a totally worthy price of admission. On that note:
Peej next to the tree at my dad’s. Like everything in that house, it leans slightly to the right (heyo!). This was the first year that we did Christmas in the family room since it was the first year that Peej’s piano was in the living room (it’s not enough that he has to upstage me with his famous musician-ness, he also has to displace my Christmas morning) and I was extremely disoriented by the whole experience. You know when you’re not paying attention as you walk up a flight of stairs and you think there’s one more stair at the top but there really isn’t and you pick your foot up too high and then fall down a little? That’s what this was like. When I tried to express how I was uncomfortable with the break from tradition Peej blew up with “Where the hell were you when they took The Indian down off the wall, huh??” The Indian being a print that hasn’t appeared in the family room for over a decade and whose disappearance apparently scarred Patrick for life. We have long memories.
En Route to Stickles Family Christmas Eve, Dad, Peej and I did our annual round of Let’s Name All of The Presidents In Chronological Order. Every year this game makes me promise myself that I’ll somehow memorize all of them over the course of the coming year so I can wow the history nerds with my newfound knowledge come Christmas, and every year I fail to do that and embarrass myself mightily. It’s a rotation game– if I name the first president (which I can, in fact, do), then Peej names the second, dad names the third, I name the 4th, and so on. This year Peej decided to mandate that we also each include a Fun Fact about the president that we were naming, with margins wide enough to include things like “Our fattest president!” (Sorry, Taft). The rotation worked out so that I was saddled with President Number 3. I had no idea who that was. I started randomly naming Founding Fathers while all of the color drained from my founding father’s face as he thought about all of the money he spent turning me into an alumni of the same university as Thomas Jefferson only to have me completely disgrace his legacy on Christmas Eve ‘08. Oops. Sorry, TJ. I’m usually good through the first 10 or so presidents because I just name buildings on the William & Mary campus, but after that I’m a disaster all the way up until Carter. This year I was lucky enough to pull president #21, Chester A. Arthur, which I only know thanks to the Die Hard movies. Take whatever you can get, Dad!
At Christmas Eve I remain a founding member of the kids’ table (I am 3rd oldest of the children at this half of the family, after Bud and Katie Bud’s Wife) where we have our own set of traditions. Within 3 minutes someone will bring up that corn makes you aggressive and that’s why they don’t serve it in prisions, a fun fact I can be blamed for due to the one day I was paying attention in my Biology of the Mind class or whatever it was called that I needed to complete my priceless and extremely useful Psychology degree at Mr Jefferson’s University. We also take bets on how long it’ll be before we hear Aunt Maryellen go “Did we go oldest to youngest or youngest to oldest last year??” as she starts trying to figure out what the present distribution order will be. And we go with the old standbys– staring at The Baby as she does cute stuff and demanding that Peejplay the piano. Or, if possible, both:
Piano Meg from Cristin on Vimeo.
Meg and Peej Piano Time is one of my favorite things. After I uploaded this video, I went back and watched the first one I took this spring when Meg was about 10 months old and instantly became terrified of how big she’s getting and how she looks like a real person now instead of a baby. Sometimes when Older Brother Bud is in foreign countries for work or for grad school he likes to drink too much and send me emails about how Meg’s getting to be a kid instead of a baby and they make me want to laugh and cry simultaneously because I feel like we all want her to stay little and grow up at the same time.
Cousin Thomas is one of the younger occupants of the kids’ table, but if keeps delivering performances like this year’s, I’m going to look forward to his Christmas Company for decades to come. I can’t stop laughing at this picture. At my aunt’s baby shower when she was pregnant with Thomas we all went around and made one wish for the baby and I said I hoped he had Uncle Mike’s sense of humor, so I’m taking full credit for this one. This kid’s going to grow up to be a total ladykiller.
I was pretty excited for this to be the first Christmas where The Baby figured out what the deal was with presents but that’s going to have to wait until 2009, because she hasn’t quite gotten it down. I need to show her the pure joy that comes with creasing wrapping paper at perfect 45 degree angles as you’re preparing your gifts and the even bigger joy that comes from completely destroying the work someone else did on a present that was wrapped for you. The main times when we could get Meg to pay attention to her presents was when they were books.
I could talk for a week about how this makes me feel and still not be able to describe it well enough– it feels like when I watch Peej on stage, or when people ask me why I have a picture of an aircraft carrier in my office and I get to explain that I’m Brendan’s sister, and I almost wind up crying thinking about how proud I am of them and how lucky I am to be related to them. And how I better get to work at actually accomplishing something in my life so that the two of them can know what that feels like. I have said a thousand times that I had two main fears in life– one is being pushed in front of a subway train (this isn’t getting any better as I get older and {allegedly} wiser. Every train I get on, Tiny Lunatic Cristin in my brain exhales and goes “well, that’s one less train we’ll get pushed in front of.” Then Tiny Even Crazier Cristin in my brain goes “yeah, but doesn’t that mean that we have a greater statistical chance of getting pushed in front of the next one?” You would not believe the amount of mental space I devote to this argument. Watching me walk towards the yellow line as my train pulls in is like watching the last 10 minutes of Field of Dreams), and the other is that if I have kids, they won’t like to read. Because really, if you wanted to make me mad, what would you do? You would root for the Yankees, and you would hate reading.
Watching the Megatron around anything that vaguely resembles a book, though, I have to hope that some of this is genetic. I know a lot of it is her being raised by awesome parents, but this kid is almost pathological about books. She also just went horseback riding for the first time and loved every second of it. That’s my girl.
I was second-to-last in present giving this year, which means next year I should get to go second if any of us can remember, for the first time, what the previous year’s order was. And I capped my turn off, as always, with the Books For Young People distro.
Molly got an autographed copy of Julie’s book, and peer pressured into coming to spend a day with me at work under whatever vague Career Shadowing auspices we can come up with. I hope this pans out because I think we would have a ball. I can already think of a dozen people I would want to talk to her about their jobs at work, though I’m having trouble coming up with how I would explain what I do. It was recently brought to my attention that very few of my friends can describe my actual job outside of saying “sales” since they think I spend all of my time planning Halloween costumes and building gingerbread houses. Fair enough.
At my dad’s house the next morning, I spent the annual 3 hours I have to fill waiting for my brothers to wake up so that I can get some presents taking pictures of the dog with the Jack Russell ornament I got him from angles that make him look like Godzilla.
Don’t… look… behind you!
Like all of the showboaters in our family, Jack has taken to sending out his own Christmas card featuring a picture of himself. (I have no idea where he could have gotten such a lame idea). I’m rooting for this one for the ‘09 card. It’s a pretty accurate depiction of Jack’s Reign of Terror over my parents’ house.
One of my big accomplishments for Christmas this year was not using any gift wrap, which was very difficult for me emotionally. I think that everyone has One Thing that they are better at than everyone else they know, and my Thing is gift wrapping. But it’s all bad for the environment and stuff, so this year everyone got their presents in reusable bags (most of which were Brooklyn tote bags from Fishs Eddy, because I might be environmentally conscious but I am still self centered). My second big accomplishment comes with a big thank you for WorkFriend Amanda, who alerted me to the existence of Fruit Stickles. Considering how much time I know Older Brother Bud spends googling his family members, I can’t believe he didn’t find them first. (Before you become as confused as we were, there is no fruit in those packages– they’re basically popsicle sticks coated in some kind of flavoring that you use to spear fruit. I KNOW. How have you lived this long without them?? Peej opened his and immediately busted out “Yeah, I hear this all the time. Except it’s usually preceded by ‘You’re a–’.”).
Check out the clogs on this kid. And their close proximity to one of my favorite books of ‘08, which made a guest appearance on Christmas morning.
This was the first year I decided to use my morning downtime constructively to shower and make myself look presentable so I don’t have that “hey, what’s that homeless person doing in my house?” reaction I usually wind up with when I scroll through my christmas pictures. That’s why I’m including this picture– just so we have proof that there was one year where I had good hair on Christmas morning.
Peej is the hardest of all of us to find gifts for. All of his clothes have been previously owned by 70 year old men and then sold at a garage sale, he lives out of a suitcase and has very little need for material possessions, and he’s a music and literature snob. Last year our mom gave him a box of money and I was jealous that I hadn’t thought of that first. This year I gave him the most random collection of stuff ever, including this slide whistle that I found at Blue Ribbon General Storewhile I was doing my Shop Local christmas blitz. If you got a christmas present from me, part of it probably came from this store. It is the best place on earth. I wanted everything that they carry the second I stepped foot in there and I plan to go back as frequently as possible and if you live in Brooklyn you have no excuse for not shopping here because it’s one of those places that you want to sleep over in, it’s so cool, and you feel like you’re giving your money to an establishment you have an emotional connection to instead of, say, buying zombie movies in bluray online, as I’ve been doing all morning. I was singing along to the Boss’ version of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town when the owner went “so you’re from new jersey?” and I fell in love with her. It’s a great place. And it had this slide whistle, which captured peej’s attention about 8 times longer than anything else I’ve ever given him. I’m resolving to get him one weird musical instrument per gift giving holiday from now on.
But that slide whistle had nothing on what went down at mom’s house. After two months of talking about how much I wanted a fake bearskin rug, my dreams have finally been realized. As I type this, on my couch with the rug within site, I’m a little worried that I’m becoming a cartoon character here– that the more weird stuff I amass in this apartment, the closer I am to turning into a weird cross between Willy Wonka and one of those crazy old ladies who hordes old newspapers and bottles of urine because she’s afraid to throw anything away. It’s a slippery slope, I imagine. But for now, my joy at owning the bear overwhelms all other hesitations. I have great plans for this rug, and you can watch them take shape here. If you’re planning a visit to Sunset Park any time soon, you should probably have a couple of poses in mind for your photo session.
More of The Baby reading! I can’t get enough of this! Here she’s reading a book about a pig named Mimi from our friends at Bloomsbury who suggested this when I started bemoaning the fact that Meg couldn’t say her own name and had started to refer to herself as Mimi, the way Mariah Carey does sometimes. I was vehemently against this initially, knowing how hard it is to shake a nickname in our family once you pick it up, but I’m coming around. I like that it’s not her real name and I like that she picked it out for herself, and I like that she clearly knows her name is Megan but sometimes refuses to pay attention to you unless you call her Mimi, and I like that her dad has taken to nicknaming her nickname and just calling her Meems and when he’s holding her winter jacket and trying to get her into her car seat will be like “Meems, are we ready to do this, or what?”
A few days after Christmas we were enjoying more Baby Time and Katie told me a story about how Meg had watched the Grinch movie for the first time that week, and how through the whole thing she kept repeating something but no one could understand what she was saying. They thought she was saying “pop-pop,” which is a version of what she calls one of her grandpas, but whenever they pointed at said grandpa that didn’t seem to placate her. After awhile someone figured out that she was looking at the Grinch cartoon and saying “Hop On Pop,” which is one of the Seuss books she has at home. My head exploded when I heard this. “SHE KNEW! She knew it was the same illustrator! She was giving you COMP TITLES! She’s going to work in CHILDREN’S BOOKS!” Oh, Meg. Even if you grow up to be a Mets fan (which is unlikely given your mom roots for the Evil Empire and your dad recognizes that saddling his children with that is setting them up for a lifetime of disappointment) I might never be prouder of you than I was right there.
Added bonus of the bearskin rug– it quickly became background scenery, and I didn’t realize how scary and hilarious that was until I uploaded the pictures and saw that there was a terrifying stuffed rug silently screaming just off center in many of my shots. I like this one in particular for the juxtaposition of horror: What’s more frightening, an angry bear about to eat you, or a doll that your grandma gives you that has four faces and a head that spins around?
Grammie is Big Into Feelings, to put it mildly. So when she saw a doll that could help someone in the pre-verbal stages of their life express how they were feeling, she couldn’t resist. Usually I can fake it when someone opens a ridiculous gift but as soon as the Feelings Doll showed up at Christmas I damn near lost it. I mean, come on. That’s the creepiest thing in the world. With the possible exception of:
Peej gives Elmo a hug, as commanded from Cristin on Vimeo.
Elmo Live. Ironically, I am convinced that this doll is the last thing you see before you die. Horrifying.
After we were done playing with dolls it was time for the gambling and the accusations of trickery. A week before Christmas we had all gotten an email from my mom instructing us to send her our favorite Christmas song so that she could compile a CD and we could have a fun time listening to it and trying to guess who had picked what song. I assumed that this would land us with 6 repeats of All I Want For Christmas Is You so I avoided that one on purpose. I was initially going to go with Feliz Navidad in honor of the door decorations every apartment building but mine in a 4 block radius is sporting, but ultimately chose the John Denver & the Muppets version of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas. Since this isn’t enough to jack up everyone’s blood pressure we also each put in $5 to make it worth our while. I insisted that the pot be divided between first and second place, thinking that it could be the difference of just one song and that wouldn’t be very fair, which in retrospect was pretty stupid of me considering I TOTALLY DESTROYED EVERYONE AT THIS GAME. I won by a margin of 3 songs. This victory had two outcomes, one immediate and one that won’t rear its ugly head for another eleven and a half months or so: 1) The moment the scores were tallied and I was named winner Peej started accusing me of cheating. “The word document with the list was open on mom’s computer all day! You could have looked at it at any time!” And how does that mean *I* cheated since *you* were the one who knew about it, Patrick?? I guess the fact that he got beaten so badly absolved him of any potential cheating and that’s why he felt okay shouting out incriminating evidence in the wake of his loss. Whatever, pal. I’m $40 richer, and you lost. 2) I must have missed this in the fine print of my mom’s original email, but apparently the winner of this year’s game is in charge of coming up with a new game for next year. This is great news for me, as I’m controlling and like orchestrating things in such a way so that if I can’t win outright I can at least be as manipulative as possible (on New Year’s I waited until about 2 am, when all my guests were at maximum drunkenness, and then insisted that we play hide and go seek across the three floors of my apartment building. The duplex below me is vacant and unlocked while it’s being renovated which has lead to this weird Clubhouse Syndrome whenever I have people over to my apartment and I get all “the grownups are gone! WHEE!” There were moments on New Years Eve where we were all just collectively screaming for no reason because there was no one around to tell us to shut up. When everyone foolishly agreed to humor me on hide and go seek I forced Emily to stand outside in 15 degree weather to count as the Seeker so that we could utilize the whole building, and then I brought my cell phone with me into my hiding spot so that I could call the phones of other hiders and use the ringtones to direct the seeker towards them and away from me. Cristin Sticklesdoesn’t ‘play’ games, she fucking wins them, thank you very much. Not that I won that game. Though being found was worth it because it meant that I got to watch Margaret appear from a crawl space 9 feet off the ground and Webmaster Kyle crawl out from under my daybed in the living room going “It’s really dusty under there.” I’m worried that 2009 may have peaked early because I’m probably not going to have more fun than that unless I keep my BAC at a steady .15 and that will probably make it difficult to do things like flat iron my hair or, you know, my job), but bad news for the rest of my family since I’m sure the ‘09 game will basically be Calvin Ball (or, uh, Cristin Ball) and adjusted according to my ever-changing whims. At press time I’m considering revisiting an unintentional Christmas Contest of yesteryear–one Christmas when I was in college we wound up playing a weird but amazing Family Trivia game where the question asker would come up with a question about his/ herself or his/ her past and then call out someone to answer it. This was fun for awhile and then it got nasty, which children asking their parents to name one of the 8 musicals they were in over their public school careers and the parents failing miserably, or when I thought it would be fu
nny to ask Cousin Danny to name the first boy I ever kissed and he named my current boyfriend at the time (I was 20. Thanks, Dan).
Feeling invincible after my victory, I immediately take to the drink. By this point we have been sucked dry of the champagne and white wine, so I start complaining to my mom that she doesn’t have any beer that I like. She quickly points out that we still have the $3 box of white wine that I bought at a CVS in Reno because I was so amazed that you could buy boxed wine in a medical pharmacy in a state that allows prostitution. After incredulously confirming that my mom had not, as I’d instructed, thrown it away but packed it in her suitcase and flown it home from Memphis, I tore into the boxed wine and basically drank it in two sips. We won’t get into how the rest of the night went. Mostly because it’s all kind of a blur. I do remember talking about how I was planning on buying a blu-ray player the next day and my mom asking “What’s the difference between regular dvd and blu-ray?” and how that inspired a response of “It’s like the difference between watching porn and having sex” made me so proud of myself that I immediately texted it to 15 people. 
Also, Matt had brought along Apples to Apples and Patrick later informed me that I told the story of how the first time I played that game, I lost in a round where the word was “sexy” and I played “Challenger Explosion” (shut up, I was going for irony and shock value) and DIDN’T WIN that round and how I’m still haunted by it today. And then I told the story again, and again, and a few more times after that until Patrick was ready to kill me. Then I woke up the next day and there was a half-full bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade on my nightstand table.
And that was Christmas.
Another big accomplishment of mine over this holiday season was convincing Emily to take NJ Transit out to visit Glen Rock for the first time. After years of hearing Jordan and I tell stories about our hometown I think she probably thought it was one of those weird planned communities, like that town Celebrationnear Orlando where you have to sign a waiver to always be happy and where they have rock-concealed speakers that pipe in the sound of birds chirping so it can always be pleasant. That’s actually not for off. Sometimes I’ll tell stories about our town assuming that everyone else grew up in a similar Norman Rockwell painting and I get some strange looks. I only recently found out that most people have stores that are open on Sunday and are allowed to park their cars in the street overnight, both of which are strictly foreboden where I come from. Em had the astonishing good fortune of visiting on a day designated as Customer Appreciation Day at the only bar we have, so we took her there. I don’t give them enough business to deserve any kind of appreciation, but my dad more than has us covered for the year. 
And they totally delivered in terms of I Was Born In A Small Town/ And I Live In A Small Town/ Probably Die In A Small Town/ That’s Probably Where They’ll Bury Me-ness, Johnny Cougar-style. We couldn’t move 3 feet without running into someone my dad knew and I think over the course of the evening we were in the presence of 8 members of my graduating class but my count could be off– the memory blurs as time goes on. Em eventually told me to stop introducing her as “my friend from work” as that was a devaluation of our relationship (point well made) and I quickly explained that I had been doing so because if I only said “friend” someone would start the rumor that we were lovers. Within 5 minutes of that explanation we overheard someone admonishing a well wisher for saying Happy Holidays with a “Fuck that. We say Merry Christmas here,” so you can see that I had a point as well. Later on I realized I should have just given Emily the name of someone we had gone to school with and introduced her as that person to see if we could get away with it all night– with some careful planning, I bet this is more than possible, and I look forward to orchestrating it for my 10 year reunion next year. We also got caught up in a conversation started by one of my dad’s friends where people started vehemently debating who the most beautiful woman to ever live was (Dad initially went with Cleopatra and Peej initially went with Mary Magdalene, proving that no matter how much I study during the off season I’ll never be able to out-nerd those two so I might as well just concentrate on my shoe collection) in which I was unilaterally mocked for my love of Jackie Kennedy. At least I didn’t go with Poppy Montgomery (DAD), as stirring as I’m sure her performance in Dead Man On Campus was. This segued into the Who Was The Most Attractive Man Of All Time fight during which I disgraced my dad by explaining to the table that in college, my friends would play a game called I’d Bang where we’d come up with a weird category and then try to name people that qualify in it that we would sleep with (Fictional Characters I’d Bang, Guys My Dad’s Age I’d Bang, Historical Figures I’d Bang At The Height Of Their Power, etc).
After we were done at that bar we decided to go to a town .6 miles away to go to another bar and see more people we went to high school with and were faced with the epic problem of how to get there. I’m having this issue living in Brooklyn, as well– I step out my door and automatically assume that there will be cabs there. Ruined forever by those years on the upper east side (in more ways than one). We eventually landed on the obvious choice of calling my mom to ask her to pick up her 23 year old son, 27 year old daughter and friend, 31 year old son and friend, and drive all of them to another bar knowing that they will eventually roll into her kitchen at 2am and eat Christmas leftovers with their hands. And she actually did it, and seemed to enjoy herself. At bar #2 I started giving people my business card so that I could make American Psycho jokes that wouldn’t go over very well, Emily continued to get hit on relentlessly by GR natives, and my brothers and I had a series of conversations that will cost me thousands of dollars in therapy as I try to erase them from my consciousness. I wouldn’t change it for the world. 
2 Responses to “So This Is Christmas: 2008”
January 5th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
I knew there was something wrong with my hide and seek strategy when I tried to hide behind my hair. Must have been the vodka.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
“It’s like the difference between watching porn and having sex.”
Huh. I think I need a new TV.
I don’t even know your niece and I’m finding those pictures approach maximum adorability.