Christmas Eve Eve

Ahhh. Christmas Eve Eve. Today is the day of my extended family's holiday celebration, which means that Mom will pick up Ryan and take her while Tom and I stay here and avoid my extended family. It's what the holidays are all about.

My family is a lot like the character list of Soap, with some Knots Landing thrown in for good measure. My grandmother you've already been told about but in case you missed that post, imagine Bev from "Roseanne" in Kurt Vonnegut's body. Then there's my uncle the religious freak and his 5 daughters. The oldest three are religious freaks like their dad, but with tattoos they think no one knows about, and the youngest two are adopted foster kids who keep getting arrested and are on a distinctly Spears-Lohan life path. My aunt, the socialite, was living in a swamp in Louisiana with her carnival worker husband when I was born, but then she married her divorce lawyer and he became a judge and she got a big house on a hill with a pool and now she thinks she's Martha Freaking Stewart or something even though her son did time in Leavenworth for manufacturing crystal meth in his dad's minivan. But her grown kids live in nice houses with nice things because she buys them for them. And in this big jumbled heap of family, I am the black sheep. Drug addictions, federal prison sentences, stints in rehab, none of these things is enough to bring any of my cousins down to my level. So I avoid the whole shebang.

I used to go to family Christmas. I would spend the whole night on my aunt's porch smoking with my uncle's wife and my aunt's husband. Sure, every once in a while Grandma would come shuffling in looking for whatever small child had run away from her that time, but for the most part is was just us smokers. But my uncle by marriage died, and my aunt by marriage left her fire-and-brimstone husband, I quit smoking, and the party this year is at my grandmother's small house, with nowhere to hide. So rather than go and try not to defend the woman I still consider to be my aunt to a house full of her ex-in-laws, I will hide like the coward that I am. Also, my cousin Dana is pregnant too, due one month earlier than me, and I don't want to face the comparisons.

But maybe I should go, since Tom is in town and I'm going to spend Christmas Day with his family. It's only fair that he spend today with my family, right? We'll see.