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Dec. 25th, 2005 05:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
molly_oMerry Christmas (if that's that you celebrate), happy Chanukah (if that's what you celebrate); if you celebrate neither, I hope you're enjoying the longer days to come and not too irritated by the omnipresent holiday trappings.
Holidays with my family are ... I don't know, maybe everyone has holidays this insane. Somehow, over the course of a Christmas weekend, a theme will develop. This year, it was G____ A_______ -- a family friend of longstanding, whose name came up twice Thursday evening, which prompted my (slightly worse for decades of excessive alcohol consumption) uncle to ask, "Who is this G__ A___? He sounds like quite a fellow." So my mom regaled us with G's biography (which is actually kinda interesting, but I'm not even going into it here), and since then I don't think an hour has passed without *someone* mentioning him. Like, someone would pose one of those, "I wonder how [some unexplained occurrence] works?" And my brother would say, with an accent vaguely like William F. Buckley's, "I bet G___A___ would know!"
And also, my brother decided we were going to deep fry the turkey. He drove down from Ann Arbor with a propane tank ("Is that ... safe?" I ask. "Well, there's some risk, but when you factor in the 16 gallons of gasoline riding underneath the car, it's not such a big deal," he says.) Friday I was deputized to Google marinade recipes, because my brother was trying to convince my mom that Vanilla Coke would make a tasty marinade base (no luck there). We call my mom this morning and ask when we should get to her house, and she says noon, but then my brother calls at 11:30 wondering where the heck are we?!, because the oil is heating up, and we don't want to miss the moment when the turkey is lowered into the oil.
We get there, and the pot with five gallons of boiling peanut oil (just shy of 350 degrees F) is in the back yard. With the rain, they've set up a beach umbrella overhead -- "the Christmas huppah," my brother is calling it -- and my brother stands beneath it, monitoring the oil. I mock him, because he's wearing the knitted hat and down vest and duck boots that have been my mother's winter uniform for, I don't know, 20 years? But he gets the last laugh, because in fact she stole all those items from my brother 20 years before. "Full circle!" he keeps saying.
I impress everyone with the **kick-ass** boots I received from RM (Oakley's tall assault boots), but otherwise managed a relatively low profile. (I did not, for example, ask who the fuck! was reading the Left Behind book I found book-marked in the hall, nor did I take my uncle -- OK, yes, with the pickled brain, but once upon a time he was an engineer who graduated from college Phi Beta Kappa -- to task for the book he was reading, collected essays challenging Darwinism! Really -- and this isn't just wishful thinking on my part, my (Republican) brother agrees with me -- my family used to be intelligent and rational. Conservative, yes, but in a reasonable-people-can-disagree way, not in a throw-up-my-hands-because-there's-no-point-even-talking-with-these-people way.)
So, in sum: funny family moments + kick-ass boots - evolution debate + juicy turkey = a happy family holiday.
Holidays with my family are ... I don't know, maybe everyone has holidays this insane. Somehow, over the course of a Christmas weekend, a theme will develop. This year, it was G____ A_______ -- a family friend of longstanding, whose name came up twice Thursday evening, which prompted my (slightly worse for decades of excessive alcohol consumption) uncle to ask, "Who is this G__ A___? He sounds like quite a fellow." So my mom regaled us with G's biography (which is actually kinda interesting, but I'm not even going into it here), and since then I don't think an hour has passed without *someone* mentioning him. Like, someone would pose one of those, "I wonder how [some unexplained occurrence] works?" And my brother would say, with an accent vaguely like William F. Buckley's, "I bet G___A___ would know!"
And also, my brother decided we were going to deep fry the turkey. He drove down from Ann Arbor with a propane tank ("Is that ... safe?" I ask. "Well, there's some risk, but when you factor in the 16 gallons of gasoline riding underneath the car, it's not such a big deal," he says.) Friday I was deputized to Google marinade recipes, because my brother was trying to convince my mom that Vanilla Coke would make a tasty marinade base (no luck there). We call my mom this morning and ask when we should get to her house, and she says noon, but then my brother calls at 11:30 wondering where the heck are we?!, because the oil is heating up, and we don't want to miss the moment when the turkey is lowered into the oil.
We get there, and the pot with five gallons of boiling peanut oil (just shy of 350 degrees F) is in the back yard. With the rain, they've set up a beach umbrella overhead -- "the Christmas huppah," my brother is calling it -- and my brother stands beneath it, monitoring the oil. I mock him, because he's wearing the knitted hat and down vest and duck boots that have been my mother's winter uniform for, I don't know, 20 years? But he gets the last laugh, because in fact she stole all those items from my brother 20 years before. "Full circle!" he keeps saying.
I impress everyone with the **kick-ass** boots I received from RM (Oakley's tall assault boots), but otherwise managed a relatively low profile. (I did not, for example, ask who the fuck! was reading the Left Behind book I found book-marked in the hall, nor did I take my uncle -- OK, yes, with the pickled brain, but once upon a time he was an engineer who graduated from college Phi Beta Kappa -- to task for the book he was reading, collected essays challenging Darwinism! Really -- and this isn't just wishful thinking on my part, my (Republican) brother agrees with me -- my family used to be intelligent and rational. Conservative, yes, but in a reasonable-people-can-disagree way, not in a throw-up-my-hands-because-there's-no-point-even-talking-with-these-people way.)
So, in sum: funny family moments + kick-ass boots - evolution debate + juicy turkey = a happy family holiday.