The 12 Days of Donkmas – Quality Time with the Family
Day 10 – Quality Time With the Family
Christmas is a joyous time, a time to spend with family. And by spend with family I mean fight like cats and dogs until Aunty Susie calls the cops and gramps ends up with a mouthful of bloody chicklets. Why is this? It always starts out so promising. We look forward to spending the holiday together, we promise this year is going to be different, and yet before the day is through half of us aren’t talking to each other anymore and the other half won’t shut up as they hurl insults back and forth.
My favorite example of the strife that Christmas can bring to families happened about 14 years ago. Donk was a brilliantly handsome young man of 19, still living at home with my parents. My older sister, Claire, however, had moved out about a year before. She had lived with a couple of female roomates for awhile, and my parents were fully supportive of her independence. Well, that is until she met the dark and sinister Farmer Vincent, who would later become her husband and my lover. Soon he whisked her off of her innocent feet and convinced her to live in sin with him in a roach-infested den of ill repute.
Now, my pops was a good man (despite the whole pyromaniac thing) but he was also oldschool, and harbored a steel will and a temper that was legendary throughout a good portion of the Western hemisphere. So, needless to say he was none-to-thrilled with the prospect of some dude banging away at his daughter on a sleeper sofa in a tiny studio apartment. He immediately put into effect one of the most effective tools in his vast arsenal: he gave Farmer Vincent the silent treatment.
Farmer Vincent didn’t have much occasion to come around our house, so for quite some time my dad’s vow of silence had little impact. But then Christmas approached and my sister, who has always been stubborn and some say mildly retarded, decided to insist that Farmer Vincent spend Christmas morning with us at my parents’ house. To most, this would sound like the worst idea since the Segway, but to Claire it made perfect sense; this was her man damnit, and my father needed to learn to accept, nay embrace him!
Poor Farmer Vincent. He walked into the house that Christmas morning like a lamb to the slaughter, led by my sister, the glow of victory fresh on her smiling face. What followed was the most dreadfully uncomfortable gift exchange I have ever experienced. Farmer Vincent did his best to lighten the mood, cracking jokes and making my mom and the rest of us laugh, but it was apparent from the get go that my pops was having none of it. He sat there in stony silence, a lit cigar clamped between his teeth.
As the morning progressed, the room got quieter and quieter until only the sound of tearing paper could be heard. Farmer Vincent continued to throw out the occasional joke, but he was now covered with the flop-sweat of a failed stand-up comic in danger of being booed off stage. I myself was mortified; I can only imagine how much more uncomfortable it must have been for him. Even my sister became gradually aware that she had overplayed her hand and lapsed into a sullen silence. Mercifully, the morning ended early and Claire had the good sense to slither out, a dejected Farmer Vincent in tow. As they left, my dad mumbled a goodbye, the most he’d had to say all morning.
Of course over time fences mended, Claire and Farmer Vincent were married, and my father welcomed him into the fold. But that Christmas morning has since passed into family legend as both the Christmas that Farmer Vincent truly became initiated into the family and for the fact that my father avoided an extensive prison term for committing a homicide.
