My holiday freak out, probably only part 1

Again with the Christmas rituals.  For nearly as long as I can remember, my family has been driving about an hour away to get our Christmas tree from some former client-friends of my father's who bring them down from Wisconsin each year.  It's a magical place, where the trees hang from the ceiling of the barns and they serve hot apple cider and cookies.  If you go in the teeny tiny store, you can find one-of-a-kind holiday decorations, like the crystals we purchased one year that had been taken off a chandelier purchased at an estate sale.  Is it a pain in the ass to drive that far when we could head down the street and buy a tree from the local greenhouse?  Oh yes.  Does it eat up a whole day?  Damn straight.  Is it my favorite part of the year? You can bet on it.

This year, because my parents have been busy dealing with the final stages of building a new house, we decided we wouldn't drive all that way to get a tree.  Mom and Dad promised that the local place would have trees as big and full and fragrant.  I begrudgingly agreed and Mom called to reserve a tree because we wouldn't be putting it up until after we moved to the new house.  This was another huge departure because I generally insist on decorating the weekend after Thanksgiving.

Mom and Dad moved this past Saturday (a process I strategically missed by driving up to Iowa City on Friday to do my Christmas shopping and see my former roommates.  They were most likely happy to have me gone because of the complaining.)  We agreed to go pick up our special reserved tree on Sunday.  As Dad and I pull into the drive of the green house, we see several trees laying out to be picked up.  Once we're out of the truck, Dad finds our tree.  It's smaller than I wanted and I can see through it.  I say nothing and go sit in the truck.  Because I'm 10 and I'm pouting.

Back home and I tell Dad it's a sucky tree.  Because I'm 22 and I'm a bitch.  I start crying when Mom suggests getting an artificial tree for the living room and putting this real tree downstairs in the basement.  My Dad tells me to go away before he blows up at me.  I try desperately not to cry all the way to Target.  I somewhat get over it.  Until we put the tree up that night and it's 3 feet higher on the bottom on one side than the other.  And I pout some more.  At 11 pm, the tree is all decorated and doesn't look half bad, despite not reaching to the ceiling.  And this is how I spent my Sunday.  I have some serious first world problems here folks. 

On a side note, we're in the new house but there is no internet yet.  I have actually stayed late at work to do my Christmas shopping online and write this.  And to go comfort one of our residents when she came up to my desk all aflutter over the plane crash in San Diego.  And to teach my 35 year old co-worker how to attach a document to an email.  (Which, um, seriously? My 94 year old great grandmother can do that.)  Should hopefully be up and running Tuesday night so keep coming back to visit me.  I am pretty giddy about my first two comments. 

It's like I have the world's most expensive driver's license.

I've been sick since Sunday and trust me, this is not news to the people who have to deal with me each day.  Between the Hall's cough drops and travel packs of Kleenex I lay right next to my computer at work in the hopes that someone will pity me and the general moaning and groaning coming from my mouth, my sickness is no secret.  I work in an assisted living facility and one of our residents (note he is in a motorized wheelchair and hooked to oxygen 24/7) told me that I "looked like death" and that he was going to "run away."  Ha.Ha. Let me tell you.  The point of this, though, is that I do still really try to keep the people I have to interact with professionally (and, no, apparently my boss does not fall into this category) from seeing how sick I am.  Or how I feel as though I am going to suffocate while giving them tours of our facility.  Because dude, it's hard to talk and breathe at the same time when your nose is incapacitated.

This is how I ended up playing both waitress and valet to the 60 and over crowd in the middle of winter's first "F U Midwest" session of the season.  And no offense, but I did not sort of go to class when I felt like it and it wasn't raining or cold through 4 years of college to play valet.  Plus, it's rural Iowa, we don't even have valets at restaurants and it's because of the weather.  And because no one really needs to valet park to go through the drive-through.

But there I was, after serving food to a lively bridge club (fyi, I didn't waitress through high school or college because the thought of touching plates after people have chowed down and left behind the scraps gave me the willies but now I deliver food to the toothless) and my boss tells us that because of all the snow and our slippery parking lot, we should really offer to bring everyone's cars up to the entrance for them.  And don't get me wrong, I had no problem doing this in theory.  Because it really was slippery outside and I like to help people.  But in reality, it was really fucking cold outside.  So I tottered out across the snow and ice in my heels and coat that is super cute but hard to close flapping in the breeze to pull up a handicapped Dodge Caravan with the driver's seat about 4 inches from the steering wheel.  As I pull up under the canopy and help the tiny ladies in, I offer to brush the snow off the windows.  And she tells me, yes that would be great but the door to the trunk is broken, could I please climb back there over the back seats? With a dripping nose, burning lungs and wet feet, I do as asked, wish them a safe drive and go back into my lunch which has sat getting colder by the moment.  And I prayed no one else wanted a valet.  Or that they would at least tip.

The 2nd part of Bob Barker's spay and neuter message

When I resolutely named our first cats Snowball and Tiger, it should have been my parents' first clue to strip me of my naming privileges.  But alas, Snowball and Tiger started a long string of questionably in-bred litters of kittens.  Because I was young and didn't give much thought to things like aging, we quickly ended up with two full grown cats named Baby White Kitty and Baby Yellow Kitty. I'm sure the fact that Baby White Kitty succeeded in killing and/or eating 90% of her first and only litter of kittens had absolutely nothing to do with the lack of a diverse gene pool.   

Then there were the miniature goats, the coolest dog-like pet you can have without actually getting a dog—even though we had one of those too, named for the curls behind his ears.  We had two different goats at different times because, dude, goats start to really smell as they get older and you might as well trade them in for the younger model when there's a miniature goat farm down the road and it just happens to be owned by members of your sort-of extended family.  My brother named the first Yoshi, an acceptable name.  Miniature goat version 2 I dubbed Cocoa.  Which, eh, whatever, no real genius at work there. 

A couple years later, when I was in 4^th grade, my dad brought home a baby blue jay from one of his clients. These people had successfully raised their own blue jay and it imitated all kinds of household sounds, from the clothes washer, the phone ringing, etc. When they found a second baby blue jay in the yard, they sent it home with Dad as a pet.  That blue jay probably would have lived longer struggling in their yard than it did with us. 

I had a friend spend the night and we spent hours carefully weighing name options for the bird, eventually settling on some sort of 4 part name that started with Captain and went downhill from there.  My brother called the bird Gary and we were immediately overridden.  Unfortunately, neither name was around for long.

A year later, a months-long campaign for my own puppy culminated in a trip to a local dog breeder, a 60-something year old chain smoking lesbian.  I settled on the first small fluff ball I locked eyes with, taking home a Pomeranian. On the way home I named her Foxy Lady, because—you’ve got it!—she was the color of a fox. And also a girl. I don’t need to tell you how many Pomeranians named Foxy I’ve come across since then.  But I will tell you the number of grandmothers I've met with that name since.  One.

Point of these crappy vignettes?  If you're filling out a birth certificate, or even having a dog tag engraved, you don't want me around.   So here’s to hoping my first daughter won’t be named Tiny White Girl or Private First Class Dave. Although with today’s naming trends I might just be spot on with those. So I call dibs. If I hear anyone naming their daughter Tiny White Girl, I’ll sue. You heard it here first.

The Wench Who Stole Christmas

I'm a little anal about Christmas.  Often (affectionately?) referred to as The Christmas Nazi by family, I have strict rules about when our decorations go up and how.  After a lot of careful self-analysis--meaning I thought about it for about 5 minutes once while watching the football game at a bar--I came to the conclusion that my attachment to the holiday comes not from the presents (maybe a little) but from the associations I've drawn between Christmas and my grandma.

My grandma was a town celebrity in that she painted pictures and baked all the birthday cakes for everyone in town.  She could pretty much do anything, and so she did.  From making dolls, doll clothes or cat toys to constructing a monorail in the side yard or painting the outside of the whole house when the mood struck.  And what she did really well, was Christmas.  Decorating for Christmas each year is a sentimental journey through the 48 Hallmark ornaments that chronicle each Christmas of mine and my brother's lives and the handmade stockings, the likes of which now sell for $85 each on etsy.com but that she sat up in the hospital making the day I was born, waiting to find out what name she would embroider on the top.  The year we could no longer put out the intricate, delicate gingerbread house she'd made, was almost as bad as my first Christmas knowing the Truth about Santa.  And if our house was decorated to the nines, you better believe her house topped out at an eleven during the holidays.

Grandma passed away in the fall of my 4th grade year.  She had awhile to prepare and had done some mid-summer Christmas shopping for the family.  We opened the carefully wrapped presents that Christmas and it was...hard.  I got a plastic Shar Pei with a barking motion sensor.  That year and for several subsequent years, Grandpa gave Mom money for our presents and we could choose if we wanted her to buy presents for us with it or just take the money.  Then we got The Letter.

A few short years after Grandma passed away, Grandpa remarried to the kind of Minnesotan conservative woman of whom Garrison Keillor is so fond.  She kept a 1 1/2 foot table top tree out on the unheated porch in the back of the house and for awhile Grandpa continued to quietly mail us checks before the holidays.  And then she grinched Christmas. 

I didn't know for awhile, my parents kept their dismay quiet until December drew near.  And then we learned that there had been a letter in our mailbox some months earlier, a letter that announced Grandpa and his wife would no longer be celebrating Christmas with gifts, money or anything else.  Of course it's everyone's prerogative to celebrate Christmas in a manner they see fitting, but in our eyes, wrong or not, she had taken the last part of Grandma.  It wasn't a smooth move. 

We've adjusted and each December meets with a tepid dinner of carry out pizza at the House Christmas Forgot.  And my family returns home to a house still filled with handmade decorations and I remember my plastic Shar Pei, bought and wrapped in Christmas paper in late July.

It's a Sore Throat to Start

Hi.  I'm sick.  And while that may not be the most auspicious way to start us off, here we are.  I might as well warn you, I complain.  I was voted the Biggest Complainer of my high school senior class only a handful of years ago.  I may have voted for myself in other categories but it's safe to say, that was not one of them.  I've decided what others see as complaining is really my need to keep those around me constantly updated on my status.  You will always know if I'm hot or cold and what part of my body hurts. 

I used to write.  Quite a bit really.  For the last couple of years, I've been silently following a good portion of others' words and now I've taken the plunge to add my own.  I hope they sound as nice out in the internets as they do in my head.

You might as well know something before we start.  Sometimes I'm funny, I'm nearly always sarcastic and if I make fun of you try not to take it personally.  I like to argue and sometimes I'm sentimental.