Chaos Attraction

Maybe Christmas Won't Suck After All!

2005-12-07, 9:15 a.m.

Wow. You have NO idea how different this entry is from when I first started writing it a few weeks ago. I started writing a intro-to-Holidailies entry around the time I signed up... but stuff changed as of last night, so I need to er, do some major, major rewriting.

As SJ points out, there is some kinda pressure to make your first one good. (And incidentally, is it just me, or is Holidailies kinda like NaNoWriMo in certain respects? As Chip points out, "I know from watching past years how people sign up with the best of intentions, but flame out within days.") And I HAD a good, funny, and warped-ass entry written up about how my holidays were likely to suck ass, but I was planning on revelling in the horror, providing myself as an example of schaudenfreude, I'd made some amusing graphics to illustrate my horrible holiday tales with, etc. Only now, um, maybe this won't happen.

If you check the sidebar on the left hand side, you can see how my year has gone, i.e. Not Well. And one way or another, I had to assume the holiday was going to utterly suck. For one thing, Dad's in the hospital, so that's weird and depressing all by itself. And for another, Christmas is normally the time of year that we are assigned to see his relatives. I'm quite fond of my female cousins and their associated new family members, but my evil aunt and uncle (who shall be referred to often in here as the PITAS, i.e. pains in the ass) drive everyone up the wall. My guy cousin is a dick too, but at least I don't see him all that often. If you've seen me on Holidailies before, this is the side of the family that spends every holiday ragging on us, bugging me to get married, and asking if I'm pregnant. So between Dad being sick and the PITAS ramping up the harassment of me since I got legal, Christmas has gotten worse and worse every year.

I've been campaigning for months that we not spend Christmas with Dad's side of the family when Dad won't even be there. Go sneak around to visit the people we do like later, sure, but I strongly feel that for our own sanity, we must avoid the PITAS. Mom and I have a lot of restraint, but this, I feel, is the year that one of us, if not both, is likely to lose our shit all over Auntie Dolores. She's talked about nothing else but how her broken arm pain is so awful since it happened. While I'm not completely unsympathetic to her plight and all, in a year in which we've had two people die, one person go into the hospital until death do us part, and two people go crazy, Evil Aunt is actually doing pretty damned well in the Crappy Life Lotto in this family. And if she starts bitching and whining about her arm, or if Uncle Bruce bitches about how hard it is to be a caretaker, in front of my mom this year? I may just kill her. And on Mom's part, she desperately wants to bitch them out for acting like they're the most generous people on the planet and then pretty much flaking out and abandoning her and Dad. (Not to mention that my cousin Ron completely buggered up her yard and charged her $5000 for flooding it.)

Mom was so annoyed already at them this year that when we had Thanksgiving with my nice aunt (Susie, her sister) and company, she accepted an invitation to go to nice aunt's for Christmas! I was so excited, you have no idea. Until Mom found out that my cousin Janelle (the PITA's oldest kid, lives out of state) was actually coming for Christmas this year, and would only be in town on the 24th and 25th. Considering that normally she'd rather set herself on fire than be around her family or be in their state, you KNOW she's doing horribly since her husband died. And Mom feels guilty for not being able to go to the funeral, so she really wanted to see her. So Mom was saying that we'd go to Nice Aunt's for Christmas Eve/morning and then go see the PITA's in the afternoon as usual, before going to the hospital. Which cut the bad time in half, but I was still hoping for a full skipping.

Then last night, Uncle Bruce called Mom to tell her that adult protective services in Montana isn't doing jack shit with regards to my grandparents, and probably won't be doing anything any time soon, and their lone remaining friend taking care of them is about to burn out at any second. Mom proceeded to tell him about how all of the various stuff around her house was breaking down. And instead of volunteering help, Uncle Bruce got off the phone immediately. ("Hey," I said, "at least you know how to get him off of the phone now.") This left her seething so much that she finally declared that we were NOT seeing them the entire damned holiday!

(It also helped that she found out that Janelle was actually staying until Tuesday.)

So, HOORAY! Hopefully we won't have to see them too much this year after all!!!!

I'm still keeping my Holiday Stress-O-Meter graphics, though... Today's stress level is very low!


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