Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire. . .In Hell
by
Rebecca A Wrigley
For the first time in five
years of successful holiday avoidance on my part, I gathered with the rest of
my slightly irregular family at the home of our recently deceased Patriarch--my
mother's father. It's a quaint little clapboard house packed to the gills with
chatchkis crap. Apparently Grandpa had a compulsive knick-knack shopping habit
in his last few years. Somehow, I'm glad I wasn't around to experience that new
development first hand. Grandma's addiction to painting pictures of squirrels
and yard gnomes was, I thought, more than enough colorful wackiness.
Either
Christmas Eve at Grandpa's house was meant to be a fond remembrance of the long
standing family tradition, or it didn't occur to anyone that we'd be celebrating
Christmas Eve in a creepy shrine to my Grandparent's questionable taste. Even
weirder--there were little yellow post-it notes with various family members
names scrawled on them stuck to all the pictures, lamps, furniture, and
appliances. Well, we gathered round the warm glow of the big-screen TV (post-it
placed considerately without blocking the screen) to watch a heartwarming video
recording of a Christmas Eve past in the same house--minus the labels and a
whole lot of bad resin Golf and God themed mini-sculpture. As per tradition,
Grandpa read the Nativity sequence from a family Bible so old it was mostly
held together with spit and paper clips, while his youngest grandchild knelt
beside him. Danny was actually pretty cute at the date of the taping, probably
eight or nine years old, Tiny-Tim skinny with huge coke-bottle lens glasses.
While Grandpa reads reverently, Danny performs what we like to think of as his
"perpetual motion performance art"--it involves variously flailing
the air with both hands and lolling his head side to side ala Stevie Wonder on
speed. Danny was born with Hydrocephalus
and Cerebral Palsy. The camera swerves abruptly with a cinema verité style
reminiscent of Cops (and suddenly I'm expecting to see some half-dressed mullet
head streak through the scene clutching a beer can and screaming incoherently;
which would actually have pretty stiff competition for attention amongst my
clan). We zoom queasily in on Grandma's sweet expression as she blinks at the
camera and then back to the floor show, all the while smiling vaguely as if to
say, "I don't have the slightest idea what's going on and I think I like
it that way." A shuddering pan past Grandpa and flailing child widens to
reveal my oldest cousin Peter and myself in the foreground, both dressed in an
apparent homage to the band Kansas, complete with large incongruous
neckerchiefs, all of it nicely accessorized by the stiff expressions and
posture of political prisoners attempting to stoically endure torture in vain
reluctance to abandon that last shred of human dignity. If you're paying attention,
as we blur past my Uncle's game grin, you can catch the ever present faint
glimmer of, "They're my family, and I love them, but please let this be
over soon, Dear Lord," in his eyes. In what has to be the longest and most
ill-advised one-shot in Television history, the camera pauses once again to bob
in the erratic fashion of a drug-addict's POV, framing--yes it's another
recently deceased Grandfather. This was our wacky pseudo-French Grandpa Pete,
who could always be counted on to behave like the demented love-child of Pepe
Le Pew and Bette Middler. Whatever he said was loud and just this side of
inappropriate and he was always saying something. In fact that's what he's
doing in this shot, discoursing loudly over the venerable recitation of the birth
of the Christ child and the gentle strains of an Ave Maria recording. Beside
him, my long suffering aunt (his daughter-in-law) seems to twitch with the
desire to strangle the man into silence but restrains herself to shooting
deadly glances. At last my Grandfather finishes his reading as gracefully as it
began (mostly because he can't hear much and is completely oblivious to
anything else that may have occurred since he opened the Bible). The camera
swoops back to catch little Danny as his tribal gyrations climax in a huge
flapping of arms, page-boy haircut flaring dramatically in exponentially faster
head turns, and he shrieks, "PRESENTS!"
Now, jump-cut to the present Christmas
Eve, as my adopted sister--legally blind, developmentally disabled with
Cerebral Palsy which wreaks havoc on her coordination and balance, hugely
overweight due to a number of completely valid factors that nonetheless render
her somewhat Kong-like amongst a family of smallish short fat people such as
we--abruptly rears up from her seat in the darkened labeled living room. Lit
only by the dim flicker of Christmas Eve Past, she lurches to the back of the
room, hands slapping randomly at furniture and shoulders as she attempts to
build speed on her path to the hall-way. And say a brief prayer with me as we
thank Jesus and the Saints that this is a small one story house and fully
carpeted. Grandma has just begun blinking and smiling from the television
screen when a door thuds loudly behind us, followed by the dull thwack of
padded plastic on porcelain. As the shepherds are visited by a host of angels
and the demure choir on the stereo glides through its devotion to the mother of
Christ, we are treated to the real-time sounds of violent projectile
vomiting--taking place in a bathroom not more than six feet away (I did say the
house was small). This is the kind of regurgitation that is precede by gagging
to rival the most protracted feline hairball experience and causes audible
splashes in toilet water that last only slightly longer than the special
effects geysers rigged for The Exorcist. Everyone left in the living room
stares determinedly at the TV screen in polite silence (ironically even more
politely silent than the videotaped Bible reading), until at last my mother
explains in her new hard-of-hearing voice that everything's fine. My sister has
recently been diagnosed with possible gall stones which make her throw-up like
this after every meal. She's been doing this for at least two months, comes to
dinner every night at the parent's house, eats a hearty meal, and then returns
it before going home. Honestly I don't know why I wasn't expecting the
Christmas Eve spew, since we had just eaten dinner before sitting down around
the electric glow of video nostalgia. In hindsight, a tasteful warning
announcement for the whole extended family might have been wise. But then that
wouldn't be traditional, really, for our family it isn't a down-home holiday
celebration unless it all skates narrowly between humor and horror.
Ya
know, somehow, I feel all those
John-Denver-Dolly-Parton-Charlie-Brown-Christmas specials left me unprepared
for the very real weirdness that I seem to have been spawned from. I hope your holiday was slightly less
eventful and really, mine could have been so much worse. See, they couldn’t find the truly awful
Christmas Eve video from two years ago, where Grandpa Pete kept taking Polaroid
pictures during the Bible reading, and a twenty-something Danny read part of
the narrative while hissing distinctly audible demands for silence and awe to
his mother who had crumpled into embarrassed sniggering with me at my all-time
heaviest camera weight snorting and jiggling like a bowl full of jelly. This delightful bit of documentary-style
holiday viewing was introduced last year at Christmas Dinner where it was
played in a loop all evening long–they tell me it’s a new tradition.
