Meredith Jones Creative Writing pd.5 December 7, 2003 Christmas in my house is kind of like Tuesday. Only less important. We’ve never hung lights or stockings or even put up a tree. It’s not that my family is lazy, we are, but it’s not that. My parents are morally opposed to Christmas, for religious reasons. They refuse to celebrate it on the grounds that it’s a pagan holiday. See this is where it gets tricky, and where I had trouble explaining it as a seven year-old. People don’t like hearing they’re being blindly led to hell by their local Archdiocese…even if you say it in the nicest way possible. The thing is that my parents met at church, the church we still attend. That’s where they decided that Christmas is a really the work of the devil and their future children would be better off not celebrating it. It’s all a big conspiracy by the Catholic Church to convert the worshippers of some Sun god. That’s why it’s held near the Winter Solstice. That’s where you get the Christmas tree. And if you rearrange the letter in Santa, you get Satan. They’re like those people that research the Kennedy assassination to figure out where the Russians fit in…only with theology. Yeah, I was really popular when I was younger. I used to have teachers ask me if I was comfortable coloring a picture of Santa, they didn’t want to offend my parents. At least Heather Silverstein had an excuse… She was Jewish. She had a replacement holiday. Other than that, my family is just like the Cleavers… that is if Wally had to see a therapist three times a week, June was a workaholic that envisioned herself a martyr, the Beav got hit in the head a lot and they have all more than their fair share of psychological complexes. So maybe not exactly like the Cleavers, but in our own way… close. My mother collects chairs. She wants to hang them on the wall. She goes to parades and brings back cats…we have three cats. She’s not allowed to go to parades alone anymore. She used to show me how evergreens mated. Pinecones are really the genitalia of trees. When I was 5 I asked her where babies came from. She pulled out a worn copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves… I was the only kindergartener that knew what the clitoris was. My father’s no better. He’s a paradox of sorts. A walking contradiction in terms. When he isn’t figuring out ways the Pope is the bane of organized religion he makes up words. Words like “moosifated”. As far as I can figure it means confused. He’s the kind of man that listens to John Coltrane while watching NASCAR. And you don’t tell him it’s not a sport. He gets so mad, he shakes. You can’t pretend you’re normal when your parents are that off. I tried. For years I faked that we were just like everybody else. But I never could at Christmas. We used to write essays on our family traditions. No one believed that just I didn’t have any. I always had to clarify. I had to stand in front of the class and explain that: yes, I did go to church; no, I did not celebrate Christmas; no, I was not Jewish and no I did not hate the baby Jesus. I loved him. So much, in fact, that I could not slander his birth with presents and carols. I instead had to order Chinese food and go to the movies…Kids will make allowances for poverty. Crazy, they don’t tolerate. When all my friends were trying out their new CD players and bikes I was at home helping my mother make dinner. That was the one thing we did do. Since there wasn’t anywhere to go we’d have a big dinner as a family and then go to a movie. My father would fall asleep half way through and spend the other half asking what was going on. My mother would talk all the way through about how it’d be so much better if they’d filmed it in 50’s…when movies were good. Somehow I don’t think The Royal Tennebaums would have had the same bite in 1958. The dinner and a movie, it takes four hours, five if it’s a long movie. We eat fast. The problem is we’re stuck in the same house together all day. We should never be in an area that small for more that a few hours without distraction from one another. Someone always winds up bleeding. It’s not that we, my brothers and I, are intentionally violent people. We’re just easily bored. I have three brothers. Ian, Micah and Zachary. I’m the only girl. Ian is the least crazy out of the four of us. He is also no longer living at home. There’s a direct correlation. I could explain it better but that would require charts and some math. Because we’re all so busy now it’s rare that the four of us are all together anymore. But then again, that’s probably better for the whole of society. Once when we were all much younger Ian decided to trim a hedge in the backyard. I was helping him but he mistook my finger for one of the branches and cut the tip off. That surprisingly isn’t the only time one of my brothers has confused a finger of mine with something they wanted to cut in two. We like to hit each other a lot. Not with anything that’d do much damage. Pillows and cats mostly…we have a lot of those. One night when Zach and I were only 4 we were watching Bugs Bunny cartoons. You know the ones where Bugs would stuff his boxing gloves with horseshoes and anvils that said ACME across them? I thought it was brilliant so later that night when Zach and I had a pillow fight (an almost nightly occurrence) I decided to drop a block into my pillowcase. I smacked Zach upside his head. He fell over; blood was pooling in his hand. Zach’s been hit in the head a lot. It pretty much explains why he is the way he is. He’s a savant in his own right. Very good with video games and looking pretty…not much else. All three of my brothers have devoted much of their energy to video games. One day Ian came over to play video games only he couldn’t because Micah had hid all the games. So he took a ball of yarn and turned Micah’s room into a spider web…then he hung his old teddy bear from the ceiling in a noose he’d fashioned from the remaining yarn. Now that I think about it, we didn’t break anything that night. Odd. We have dozens of stories like that. I could go on for pages. But I won’t. Not only because it would get dull. But because I don’t like to write about my family. I like to keep them hidden, throw them in under assumed names and in alternate scenarios, always making sure you don’t know me well enough to know it’s them. Because I can’t just tell you what Christmas is like at my house and have that be the end of it. I always have to explain myself. I just want to let it lie. People don’t accept things they aren’t accustomed to. It’s something I’ve learned to live with. I’m easily embarrassed. I’m highly sensitive. I don’t forget stupid questions I get from otherwise intelligent people. I’ve had memorized answers since preschool. People ask me why I am the way I am. Why I’m cynical, why I’m cold. Why I act as if I’m better. It’s because since I was four I’ve come to understand the sheer stupidity of people much older and presumably smarter than me. …Then again I could have told you about Thanksgiving. We celebrate that. Birth of our Lord and Savior— bad. Systemic annihilation of an entire race of people because of Manifest Destiny—Bring on the turkey! But that’s boring. Turkey is boring.