The Christmas Spirit Will Not Be Taking Calls This Afternoon

The Christmas Spirit Will Not Be Taking Calls This Afternoon

After a day of firing off emails to my sister (first empathetic and gentle, later accusatory and cheapshotish, a word that I really would like to see translated into German or some other sturdy case language), I received confirmation that the rumor I heard from my mother was true- “K” is not coming home for Christmas. I wasn’t surprised but I wasn’t happy, either. Christmas, in our family, has not been a particularly life affirming holiday for the past several years, and last year was downright miserable. But this year my mother has already volunteered to work at the hospital on Christmas day, and my husband and I just spent Thanksgiving in a restaurant, and I don’t care how nice the restaurant or how well executed the menu, there are only a few good reasons to eat out on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Personally, I think that trusting oneself around people not immediate family is one of them, but I do now get why at the Grateful Dead shows there was always an area cordoned off for the “sober” people. Sometimes it helps to be with people in the same situation. In my situation, that would mean a table full of seemingly normal individuals who at any given moment break out into tears and scratch their faces. Clearly it is too early in the morning for me to be writing this.

But my sister has a medium good reason for not flying from Chicago to California, and then back again, and that reason is that she is leaving on December 27th to go to Mexico City. For…vacation? I’ve been told that it’s tacky and disrespectful to joke about the illegal organ traffic of other cities and so I’m not going to do that anymore. This trip follows on the heels of her recent fall “bicycle tour” of Detroit and nascent interest in outsider art, and I have to wonder what might be next. Birdwatching in the DRC? I attribute some of this to the fact that our father was a bit overprotective, when it came to physical security, but I keep telling her that there has to be a happy medium, and because I am seven years older and she doesn’t have to listen to me, well, she doesn’t.

In other news, the annual state employee office nativity scene reenactment is under way.