Okay, I'm back. I guess it isn't really good form to boast that I just finished the last of the Christmas dinner dishes, is it? Well, I did, though, and I'm proud. Only three days, and the turkey platter is clean! Take that, Martha! Except, of course, poor Martha, she can't take anything (obligatory bad prison lesbian sex joke here) being as how she is in Alderson, the erstwhile home of Squeaky Fromme and, also, less famously, my completely insane ex mother in law, whose dope growing scheme went hideously awry sometime in the early 80s.
Which would bring me to the subject of family, and why I have been away for 10ish days: my own completely insane family. It was a fam'ly fam'ly weekend, and it was, um, odd. But it's over now, and I'm on vacation, and both of my kids are home, and so I can't use the computer, because M. got Halo, and Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons of 1942, and some other very famous expensive game II for Christmas, and as a result he has only barely left the keyboard to eat and sleep. Actually he's mostly eating at the keyboard. A. got Sims 2, which you can't use without a DVD drive; this was a dumb buy on her mother's part. Bummer tunes.
These things happen, and so do eccentric 76 year old pothead aunties who turn out to drink like fish. I thought the big substance abuse issues were all on my father's side of the family, but turns out I'm way wrong. Auntie A. got so drunk at Christmas dinner that she took out my pinecone wreath; granted, she's been smoking what she quaintly refers to as "tea" since 1947 on a daily basis and being deprived for the weekend was rough on her. This is the aunt who said to me (in the early 90s) in complete seriousness: "Oh wow, you don't have enough bread to get a better pad? That is heavy. Here, smoke a little tea." I thought she was the most awesome person on the planet when I was a teenager, but (cue music here) I'm an adult now, and I can see why my brother complains now and then about living in the same city as Auntie A. She did, however, have an affair with Franz Kline. This rates some major cool points, after all.
Christmas dinner in general somehow didn't work out quite right. I'm not sure what happened, whether it's the fact that my mother thinks my house is crawling with plague germs, the number of barking dogs, the drunkenness of the aforementioned auntie, the mountains of wrapping paper, or what, but somehow, it wasn't what I had envisioned. I thought it was going to be this wonderful evening, full of family love, maybe some deeply meaningful things would get said, the fire would be snapping away, great food, candlelight, conversation - you know, the whole deal. But dinner wasn't anywhere near ready when they got there, I had to keep running back and forth to the kitchen, which was a horrifying disaster mess which made my mother turn pale and sort of swoon, at which point, or maybe it was later, she tried to lean on the papasan chair and fell over, chair and all. That made my brothers leap to help her, which naturally set the dogs off. Auntie A. had another vanilla vodka and tonic (all I had in my liquor cabinet was Jamesons, tequila, and a fifth of vanilla vodka somebody left at a party last summer) and my AA brother drank a Michelob light by mistake. My other brother, who has a bleak sense of humor somewhat akin to my own, decided at that point that he wasn't going to drink - or talk - just sort of stand back and watch the chaos mount.
Probably telling the whole family about the big dog crisis that had happened right before they got there was also a bad move: Theo ate an entire big plastic candy cane full of Hershey's Kisses. We called the vet when we discovered this, not sure whether to worry more about the chocolate or the tinfoil it was wrapped in. The vet said he would probably be okay (keep in mind that this is the dog who ate a Lexapro last week with NO, I mean NO, discernible effects whatsoever) but to feed him 1 millileter of hydrogen peroxide per 10 pounds of body weight to induce vomiting anyhow. So A went off in my car for hydrogen peroxide and M and I attempted to weigh the dog. This was more difficult than it sounds, because we have this digital scale that starts to freak out if you move it around too much, and handing a large and unhappy dog to a 13 year old who keeps doubling over in hysterical laughter while trying to stay on the scale qualifies as moving it around too much. Eventually we determined that Theo weighs 48 pounds, and then A. got back with the hydrogen peroxide, and we discovered that noone in this family has the faintest idea what a millileter is, or what it might look like. We called the vet back, and he said nearly a tablespoon, so we put nearly a tablespoon in the turkey baster (took it right out of the turkey) and took Theo outside. We congratulated ourselves on thinking of the outside part, or at least I did, because my initial idea was to do it in the bathroom, which clearly would have been a very, very bad idea. So I squirted the turkey baster into Theo. He didn't seem to mind much, and we all waited, while he licked the turkey baster happily. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happened, as far as we know, since we left him outside for a while, but he seemed completely fine. Nearly a tablespoon of hydrogen peroxide is as nothing to a dog with a stomach full of hershey's kisses, tinfoil, and turkey grease. He came in and licked the garbage can. Still, telling our guests of this adventure seemed to cast kind of a pall over the evening, since they kept eying him nervously. Not that that's unheard of, since if you sit down in my house, you have to kind of expect Theo to immediately get into your lap and lick your face, and some people take this better than others.
So then we got dinner on the table, and everybody ate, and all was cool, except for the part where I had to make new gravy, since the original gravy was heinous, and the part where Auntie A. fell off her chair, and the part where my lovely daughter A. suddenly allowed her inner sullen 15 year old to spring forth. . . but then, thank the gods, dinner was over, and my whole family beat a hasty retreat. I personally retreated to the fireplace, where I smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank up all the wine they had brought for dinner, which resulted in a truly classic hangover on Sunday: I didn't even get out of bed until 4:00.
They did however give us some really fabulous gifts. My younger brother gave me books on raising chickens and goats in your backyard! and my older brother gave us all gift cards, always terrific, Auntie A. gave cash in envelopes printed with a somewhat shaky hand, and my mother gave me LL Bean boots and a pair of, I kid you not, black fleece overalls, which will come in handy for feeding those chickens I'm going to go out and get, now that I have the book, and we gave them some great and wonderful things as well. I gave my younger brother a porcelain Chinese acupuncture head, and M. gave him a big standing water bubble tube complete with plastic fish. A. gave my older brother a book on heroin and the CIA, which he quite liked, and gave my mother a book about Jackie Kennedy's clothes. Present wise, I think we did very well this year. I gave the kids socks and underwear, and $50 bills in their stockings, and M. got a pirate laundry hamper from Archie McPhee and an Indian poster on bad behavior for boys, and A. got moonstone earrings and clothes and a gourd candleholder I made. She brought me beautiful jewelry from the store where she works and two pairs of slippers, and my friend J. brought me pink slippers with martini glasses on them. All in all I got two robes (M. gave me a big fleecy one) and three pairs of slippers, so I guess we pretty much all accept the fact that I only leave the house to go to work these days.
So it was a nice Christmas, all in all, and thank the gods it's over.
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