Best Christmas Ever

Warning: Profanity.

Who decided to put Thanksgiving and Christmas so close together?

Who is responsible for this?

I have a running list, mostly in my head, about two different groups of people. People who deserve statues to be built in their honor and people who should burn in hell.

The people who deserve statues are the woman who invented chicken wings, the man or woman who invented yoga pants, and my neighbor Mr. George, the single nicest man I ever knew who never said one bad word about anyone ever and who lived to be one hundred faithfully married to the single meanest woman I ever met. 

The people who can burn in hell are whoever invented burpees and the person who put Christmas and Thanksgiving so close to each other.

And Mrs. George.

Holiday dinners with my family, or any extended time with my extended family, really, has always been a challenge.

My family and the truth have a distant relationship. It hovers on the edge of possible and improbable. Descendant from British aristocracy. Nope; Farmers from Wales. An uncle who played for the White Sox. Nope; A peanut vendor outside the stadium. Great Grandfather Eichelberger impaled bailing hay in a farming accident. Big Nope. 

Our great grandfather died in an asylum from syphilis. The internet has truly been the bane of our family history.

Due to these revelations, and so so many others, my siblings and I came up with our own family crest. A pitchfork with the red circle-backslash symbol over it and a Latin phrase that roughly translates to: Don’t Let the Truth Get in the Way of a Good Story.

What my family lacks in reality, they more than make up for in intolerance and self-righteousness.

Every Thanksgiving is the warm up round for the main event at Christmas. Thanksgiving is where the grounds are set for the full blown arguments that will accompany the standing rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, rotating potato preparation, and some sort of brown vegetable that began the day as a green one.

Politics and religion are often the catalysts. We’re all the same religion, those of us born into the family anyway, and therefore the only ones who count according to both my grandmothers, but two of us married people of different religions. My wife was raised Catholic, which according to my protestant relatives is not close to the same religion. And my brother’s husband is agnostic, which according to all of my grandparents means he is going to hell on two accounts while my brother is probably just going on the one.

None of that was as bad, however, as my sister’s husband who joined us last and who is a diehard Green Bay Packers fan. Bringing that to a family holiday dinner in a Chicago family that agreed on almost nothing except being Bears fans was the ultimate Christmas blasphemy. My wife and Bill’s husband were never so happy to have a new member of the family.

I actually never bought into the idea of hell, at all. Not even for Mrs. George. Seemed to me like a pretty transparent religious strategy by church elders to scare their followers into being their followers. I brought that up on Thanksgiving this last year. I should have known better. I just really wanted to get through it with minimal conflict. Just eat, get drunk and get home. It’d been a long year, and I could’ve used some year-end peace. 

I just couldn’t keep my big mouth shut.

By Christmas, my zealot cousin, Rachel, was armed with a stack of index cards of biblical references that she demanded indicated the existence of a hell.

Rachel was married to Ethan, a fundamentalist preacher whose stated career goal was earning a six-figure salary by the age of 35.

Even my super fundamentalist father rolled his eyes at that one.

Ethan regularly lectured the rest of us, everyone he met really, for putting too much commercialism into Christmas. There was no tree in their house. No stockings. Gifts were exchanged, to be sure. Rachel got a new car every other year, passed off as a necessity for getting the children to school and soccer practice. Necessity. The rest was focused on the religious aspect. Putting Christ back into Christmas. Never mind that all of us had manger scenes of one kind or another front and center in our homes along with our trees and stockings, he said it every year at every meal to every one of us. At least once. Only then would we find the true meaning of Christmas.

Ethan found his true meaning of Christmas this year in helping Rachel try to prove the existence of hell.

Accompanied by Andy Williams singing “Do You Hear What I Hear” in the background. 

Most of her fire and brimstone flash cards were in Ethan’s nearly illegible handwriting, Rachel having to pause, to most of our amusement, every other card to ask him what at least one word was.

Her misreading of “Sheol” as “school” led mercifully to a five minute interruption for us to refill our drinks while she attempted to reassure her now teary children that when they were sent to school, they were not being sent to hell.

“Ready for round two?” Nana, my mom’s mom, asked me in the kitchen, refilling her Chardonnay. 

“Hell yes,” I said, clinking my beer to her wine glass. 

“You’re going to get coal this year,” she said. “Your naughty side is showing.”

Believe it or not, I believe in God. And Jesus. Completely. Go to a church, but sometimes just watch online. One of those ones where they serve coffee during service, wear jeans and have a band versus a choir and organ. Not a “real” church, by Ethan and Rachel’s standards, and probably silently agreed to by some other members of the family. 

What would surprise most of them, I pray a lot. Not just for me. For my whole irritating family. Even Rachel. On my best days, which is admittedly not very often, I even pray for Ethan. Sort of. Maybe twice. And pretty half-hearted if I’m honest. I even say grace before I eat. When I’m alone or with my wife and kids. Just not out in public. Not like Ethan who makes a grand gesture in every Applebee’s he and Rachel dine in with their horde of kids on “kids eat free” night - a special kind of hell for the poor wait staff. Ethan makes sure he is seen leading others to bow their heads, is loud enough to be heard by all tables in their section, after which he smiles beatifically at the other gathered diners.

I’m convinced he’s waiting for their applause. 

I freely admit, I’m no theologian. I’m pretty sure, though, big salaries and the admiration of the family restaurant dining crowd isn’t what God was shooting for in any of the scriptures, or the Torah, or the Koran or any holy book. What I didn’t have were the details, though. I didn’t know any of the texts well enough. I knew there was no way I was going to win this argument on merit.

But I was sure as hell going to win the room. And in the most childish way possible.

First of all, I knew what was coming. Decades of Thanksgiving groundwork for Christmas onslaught had prepped me for it. There was no way Rachel and Ethan weren’t going to come guns blazing for me.

Second, I learned early on from my family, and society in general, as I got older, that if you couldn’t win the argument on logic, deflect. Throw things back in their faces. Whataboutism is rampant in every online forum thanks to social media and comment page postings by keyboard warriors on news sites. 

But whataboutism didn’t start there. It flourished there. It was formed around family holiday dinner tables. Specifically my family holiday dinner table.

Don’t like what the current president said about the current thing that has half the table harrumphing? Well what about that thing that the last president that the other half of the table supports did about that other thing that has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re currently talking about.

What about that?

They’d be ready for that tactic, though. I knew I needed something else. I knew I had to throw them off their game.

Rachel continued running through her index cards to prove hell existed. (Honestly all she would have had to do is cite what she was putting me through right there, and she’d have had me. “Yep. There’s a hell. And I’m in it right now. You win.”) I’d had enough. I started talking about how hot it was getting in the room, and asking if anyone else was feeling warm. I pushed up the sleeves on my sweater and downed a glass of water and then grabbed my wife’s water and downed that. She knew what I was up to. I’d rehearsed in front of her the night before.

“Is anyone else getting warm?” I asked, making a production of fanning myself. My brother and his husband forced back smiles. They knew I was up to something. 

“Seriously, it’s hotter than hell in here.”

Rachel glared at me. “Can you be serious for one minute.”

“Can we turn down the heat?”

My mom bit. “Oh for crying out loud. Why don’t you take off that stupid sweater if you’re so hot,” she finally said.

“Good idea, mom.” I said, grinning briefly at my wife. “You sure you don’t mind? I only have a t-shirt on under it, and I know you prefer we dress better at the dining room table.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” she said, waving for me “Give me that ridiculous thing before you have heat stroke.” She forgot her mother had knitted it for me two years earlier. Insulted, Nana didn’t speak to her for the next three days.

I did as instructed.

Half the table did a spit take.

My father invoked Christ’s name.

It was fitting because on my t-shirt was an illustration of Jesus, covering his eyes and shaking his head with the caption “Y’all motherfuckers need Jesus” written beneath it.

Rachel dropped her cards. Ethan began protesting, calling it blasphemous. Rachel called me childish.

I responded by repeating, “I know you are but what am I?” Over and over again. To anything they said. My dad started yelling at me to put the sweater back on and grow the hell up. My dad’s parents, however, couldn’t stop laughing, my grandpa repeating “y’all motherfuckers” laughing until he was beet red. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard an 88-year-old Marine chant “y’all motherfuckers.”

My brother high-fived me. My sister kicked me under the table and shot daggers at me, her children asking her what a motherfucker was.

My Aunt Caroline, Rachel’s mom, began packing up her dishes and getting her coat and demanding to my Uncle Bert that they leave that minute. Uncle Bert pointed at me and shouted that I was the motherfucker, Aunt Caroline yelling at him that he wasn’t helping matters.

Rachel, Ethan, Caroline and Bert, along with Rachel’s pack of kids were out the door in ten minutes. My sister, not far behind them, took her kids home, too, glaring at me the whole time. Everyone else stayed. Even Packers fan. I won. 11-5. 13-12 if you counted kids, but kids don’t count. One of the other few things we could all agree on.

“See you in church Sunday?” I yelled after them, one last parting shot, Rachel screaming over her shoulder at me that I was such a child and that I ruined Christmas.

Ruined Christmas?

How was that possible? I thought. Christmas in this family would have had to have been good at least once for it to be possible for it to be ruined.

“You need to apologize to your mother,” my dad said later bringing beers to my brother and I in the basement man cave. Packers fan had become tolerated but he was still left to get his own beers. 

“I know,” I said, shrugging, feeling the only little pang of guilt I felt over the whole thing.

"And to your grandmother."

“Grandma?” I asked. “She was laughing the whole time.”

“Not my mother,” Dad said. “Glenda.”

“Nana?” I said, almost laughing the beer out my nose.

“Yes, Nana,” Dad said. 

“Dad,” I said, wiping the beer from my face. “Nana is the one who gave me the shirt in the first place.”

“Bullshit!” he yelled and actually shot his beer out his nose, everyone laughing, Dad the loudest.

And in our own little way, we finally did what Ethan had been imploring us to do. Put Christ back in Christmas. Albeit on a horrible horrible t-shirt. 

And it truly was the best Christmas ever.