The Friggin' Joy of the Season

Something happens right around the 22nd or 23rd of December. My papers are all graded, the final grades have been entered, and a feeling I can only describe as "Ahhhh..." washes over me. I have taken to wearing my glasses and sweatpants all day. I don't shower until 10 or 11 in the morning. Craft projects and housework magically get done. And then I realize that The Traditional Family Christmas is coming.

I positively adore family traditions. They involve going to my Grandma Dorothy's for Christmas Eve dinner, sleeping at my folks' house and getting up early to open presents with the immediate family, and then cleaning up for my mom's side of the family, who are coming over for Christmas Day lunch.

Then, every single damn year, I remember another part of the tradition that makes my Christmases so flavorful and zippy. The dysfunction, as well as the bizarre, secret family traditions, secrets I am willing to divulge right now just for the sheer fun of it.

First of all, no one ever knows when, exactly, dinner is going to be at Grandma Dorothy's. We decide on a time, but inevitably, someone forgets, or someone starts bitching and sniping because they don't like it for whatever reason. Blood pressures rise. Veins in foreheads pop. We rant and rave among ourselves, not like the stoic Scandinavians we're supposed to be, but hot-blooded Italians.

Somehow, we all end up at Grandma Dorothy's, more or less at the same time, and once the pigs in blanket-induced stupor hits us, we do the gift exchange. It's one of those random ones, where you get generics and sometimes I walk away with a pair of men's gloves or sometimes, like last year, with an ass-kicking KitchenAid paring knife. One of the gifts, however, is a little something called the Rock of Inconsistency. This tradition started probably five or six years ago by my cousin Corey. He thought it would be a good idea if there was a really random prize that moved from house to house, year after year. My uncle David volunteered a certain rock with some holes in it, created when he tested some of his hydraulic tools on it. The thing's at least twenty pounds, and each year, the person who has it adds something new. For example, one year I glued a psychadelic-looking snail made out of polymer clay onto it. The next year, my aunt glued a syringe coming out of its shell. I am still wrapping my mind around that one, but that's the thing, see: it's inconsistent, so random is the order of the night.

Things actually proceed fairly smoothly after that. Christmas morning, I can always expect that my sock will be jammed full of goodies, and my brother will inevitably give me a stupidly hilarious gift from our past, such as a DVD version of "Clash of the Titans" or a photo album filled with all my horrifying haircuts as a child (yes, I have had both a 'fro and a mullet). I would, for the record, like to point out that he, too, had a mullet at one point in his childhood.

One aspect of Christmas Day that cannot be ignored is the family tradition of game playing. My mother's side of the family is competitive, sometimes to a terrifying extent. The same year we came up with the tradition of the Rock of Inconsistency, we also came up with the Spanking Stick. See, no Christmas is complete without a little violence, and my uncle Tracy, who always talks about how he's going to "spank us" in a rousing game of Backgammon or Taboo, decided to put the money where his ass is and came up with the Spanking Stick. It's actually a wooden oar of the cheesy craft store variety, about 2 1/2 feet long, that my sister-in-law Dawn painted green with a big blue hand on it that reads, "You Got Spanked!" The person who loses the year before gets spanked by the year before that's loser (it's complicated), which means that this year, I get to spank my cousin Jim. You cannot possibly imagine how awkward that is, but it's all in good fun, and afterwards we pull out the pecan pie and mint brownies and get our sugar high on.

So, as you can see, I am not just going to enjoy a Christmas with my loving family. I am embarking on, as Clark W. Griswold says in National Lampoon's Vacation, "a quest for fun." It's sometimes uncomfortable, it's always delicious, and it's sometimes even painful, but it's my tradition, dammit, and I'll be there... with sweats and glasses on.