holidays

when i was growing up, we always spent holidays with my dad's pseudo-italian parents, his brother, and his brother's horrendous wife and three daughters. i never really understood why we bothered, because it was obvious that none of us enjoyed spending time with these people. they are loud. the worst kind of loud. the kind of loud where everyone is fighting, literally fighting, for a chance to speak next. my brother, mother, and i never participated in these conversations/competitions, so we spent all family functions sitting quietly off to the side, occasionally glancing at each other to roll our eyes or dramatically check our watches, as if to silently say, "WHEN ARE WE GETTING THE HELL OUT OF HERE?!"

my dad's brother, greg, always has a very stern look on his face, like life is so frustrating and he is so stressed out that the thought of smiling or even being completely neutral and emotionless is simply out of the question. when i was younger, he had a thick, dark moustache and i never remember seeing him wear anything besides a crisp, plain white button-down shirt, khaki pants, a brown braided leather belt around his thin waist, and perpetually polished brown dress shoes. he's always rushing around, frantically doing things like checking food in the oven or taking out the garbage. his wife, kathy, is this short, oddly-shaped woman with big, fluffy hair. she cakes her makeup on so thickly that you can see it settling in the fine lines on her face and cracking like a broken porcelain doll. she has worn the exact same strong, overly-sweet perfume forever and applies so much that you can practically see wavy cartoon scent lines radiating around her like a warm apple pie in a jughead comic. she always looks sort of glazed-over, like she's taken 5 too many mood-stabilizers and maybe a few shots of brandy. i don't think i've ever really heard her say a full sentence. she's a giggler. she laughs at everything, funny or not and her laugh is tight and strained and awkward and it makes me cringe just thinking of it. she has two modes, really. she's either giggling uncomfortably at nothing or pretending to listen and nodding with a feigned concerned look on her face.

greg and kathy have three daughters. well, technically they have two and greg has joanna. joanna is his daughter from his first marriage and, for no real reason at all, the favorite of the family. joanna could do no wrong, even when she does. she is attractive, but in a kind of weird way. she has olive skin and soft, curly, light-brown hair. she is petite with a pretty face, although i'm not really sure why it's pretty. her nose is too large for her face, her cheekbones are a bit too prominent, and her lips are strangely-shaped. but, of course, despite her imperfections, joanna somehow always appears flawless. when i was little i was always fascinated by her. she is very close in age to lisa, my sister, and i always envied my other two cousins because they were so close to joanna and she spent so much time with them.
angela is greg and kathy's oldest daughter. growing up, she was a spoiled brat with an annoying, nasal southern drawl. the word "daddy" came out more like "diddy" and she was always whining, "diddy, i want ___." and she always got what she wanted. maria is angela's younger sister. she is the baby of the family in every sense of the word and has never really done anything for herself.

our cousins were always very different from my brother and i. they were noisy and demanding. they cried all the time and they were constantly chewing doublemint gum. on the othe hand, my brother and i were quiet and polite and weren't even allowed to have chewing gum. one christmas when i was about 5, we all got toy musical instruments for christmas gifts. i had a tiny plastic piano, one of my cousins had a battery-powered guitar that lit up and played pre-set songs, and my brother had this weird organ/keyboard. we decided to put on a little show for the rest of the family. while my brother and i quietly and carefully played our little instruments, our cousin freaked out on her guitar and got so into it that her doublemint fell out of her mouth and immediately got tangled in her long brown hair. my aunt dove at my cousin, practically tackling her, and they both wailed and screamed and cried until they finally just cut the gum out of her hair. the whole time this hysteria was going on, my brother and i just continued to play our instruments. the show must go on, i suppose.

and then there were my grandparents. when i was little, my grandmother, maw maw, always had dark, dyed, reddish-brown hair that was curled and teased and hairsprayed into a round, helmet-like shape around her head. when she went out in the rain, she would carefully cover her head in a plastic rain bonnet that tied under her chin with a little strip of pink fabric. my grandmother was a cold woman. she didn't hug me. she never read me a story or baked cookies with me or took me shopping or snuck me $20 bills when my parents weren't watching. she just sort of looked at me skeptically and told me not to touch anything in their immaculately clean house. in their formal living room there was a tall, pedastal-like table with a small, white marble tabletop the size of a dinner plate. on top of the table was a bronze bowl filled with two large bunches of champagne-colored plastic grapes. i loved those grapes. they were hollow and rubbery and i could not walk past the table and resist the urge to reach into the bowl and squeeze one of them. this aggravated my grandmother to no end and as soon as i would begin to step toward the tall marble table she would shout at me to leave her grapes alone, that they weren't a toy, they're for decoration, and i was not allowed to touch them. this, of course, made me want to play with them even more. i remember one time when i was walking down the hallway on the way to the bathroom, i glanced into the living room and saw the grapes, taunting me from their fancy little perch on top of the table. i crept over to the bowl, reached in, squeezed a grape, and was horrified when it broke off of its plastic stem. i felt so guilty that i brought the broken grape to my grandmother, placed it in her spidery hand with manicured, glossy-red nails, and told her how sorry i was. she just scowled at me.

my grandfather. paw paw. he was a round, bald man, even when i was 4 years old. he had a broad, full laugh and a warm smile. he sat in a tattered brown recliner all the time and i would climb up into his lap and he would talk to me in a weird baby-talk voice that i could never really decide was annoying or just really hilarious. so i just laughed with him. he was such a sweet man and i think he was the only man in the world that was nice enough to love my grandmother. he took care of her and that was his greatest and proudest achievement in life.

since my grandparents were so paranoid about their grandchildren wrecking their house or breaking their ceramic angel figurines or getting crayon marks on my grandmother's favorite pale pink tufted sofa, they sent us all to the basment as soon as we arrived. it was a huge concrete room with a big round table, paw paw's tool bench, an ancient stationary bike, and clotheslines stretched from one wall to the other. paw paw would go to the dollar store and stock up on things like cheap crayons and coloring books and playing cards. before we arrived, he would arrange the items neatly on the table for us and i was always really excited to open the fresh boxes of crayons each time. my brother, my cousins, and i spent hours in that basement, playing hide and seek and my dad's old rock 'em sock 'em robots game that had miraculously appeared on the big round table one christmas. when i was about 10 years old, paw paw taught us to play poker- 5 card stud. and, somehow, i was really good at it. i have no idea how to play it anymore, but i will never forget how paw paw looked at me when i beat him 4 times in a row and he hadn't let me win once.

even though we spent hundreds of holidays in that house, they all sort of blend together in my mind because they were always the same, especially christmas. paw paw had the worst fake christmas tree known to man. it looked like a green pole with big green pipe-cleaners stuck into it. the only ornaments he had were a billion gold spheres and the chirping bird. the chirping bird was the bane of my dad's existence. it was a little plastic bird with feathers glued all over it and some sort of motion sensor inside, so that every time someone walked past the christmas tree, it let out a high-pitched, ear-splitting chirp. this was hilarious to paw paw and no matter how much everyone begged him to give us just one christmas without the bird, he refused. besides the bird, there were several other christmas traditions. like the suspenders. my dad, uncle greg, and paw paw always wore the most hideous, red suspenders with santa claus faces all over them every christmas. last year was my first christmas without paw paw and the only gift my dad gave me was paw paw's santa suspenders and his matching santa tie that had a little button you could press that played jingle bells.

every christmas, my grandparents always gave my cousins and i the exact same gift but slightly different colors or versions and my brother usually got something weird and random and unrelated. my mom and my aunt kathy always got identical gifts and so did my dad and uncle greg. it was always sort of a race to see who could open their gift first because as soon as one of us did, we all knew what we were getting. it was almost always terrible clothes that they bought from JC penney because they had a lifetime discount card since paw paw worked there for 20 years. the gifts were always wrapped in plain white complimentary gift boxes with the jc penney logo on them and a cheap stick-on bow. and, for some reason, paw paw insisted on putting a million pieces of scotch tape on the seams of each box so that any time anyone wanted to open a gift, my dad or uncle would whip out a pocket knife and saw through each piece of tape.

the first christmas i can remember was my 4th christmas and we all got sleeping bags. my brother's had the ghostbusters on it and mine had lady lovelylocks. i didn't and still don't have any idea who lady lovelylocks is and, frankly would've preferred the ghostbusters. but my sleeping bag had a picture of a blonde princess in a long, sparkly pink gown, and she was surrounded by birds. even though i had never heard of lady lovelylocks, there were birds on it so i loved it. it was soft and fluffy and i spread it out on the living room floor and pretended to fall asleep on it.

after opening gifts we would always have dessert. each year someone would make an enormous batch of these horribly dry and bitter italian cookies covered in a frosting that had the consistency of elmer's glue. they are disgusting but, for some reason, every year i would eat at least one, maybe just to remind myself how gross they are. besides the cookies there were always at least 3 betty crocker cakes, huge trays of candy and pre-packaged cookies, and always a horrible fruitcake that nobody every touched besides paw paw. i always thought it was really strange that everyone brought so many desserts but nobody ever really wanted any. it was just how it was. a few years ago there was only one small plate of the gross italian cookies, a spice cake, a fruitcake, and a small bowl of peanut m & m's and something just felt wrong. the following year the entire table was covered with desserts again and things felt more normal.