Why I love the holidays — and even the relatives
Pastiche
Benjamin Baxter |
The holidays brought good cheer, avarice, good feelings and relatives to myself, and I’m sure they did for most of you charming readers as well.
To everyone else, my condolences.
Being that I get to see my relatives infrequently, the visits can be and have been pleasant in recent years, though at times they remain awkward until the ice is broken.
Once the ice is crushed with all due prejudice and the tension breaks there is little to no cause for alarm.
 That isn’t to say there aren’t rough spots. By all means, there have been family members in miserable moods at the Christmas dinner or talking some seriously irate turkey throughout Thanksgiving.
I’m just saying I happen to like those spots for the sake of personal reflection and being thankful for all the things I have.
I have a place to live, things to eat, friends who inadvisable and incorrectly proclaim themselves my mortal enemies and an education.
Most of all I have the distinct pleasure of not going to San Jose State. My family lives there. But it’s truly in the idiosyncrasies of my family I find the most joy.
Don’t think that I dislike my extended family and enjoy disliking them with extreme prejudice, as if, as incentive, there were an invective contest I was aiming to win.
I like my family most especially in the small doses I have them.
Just think of this as the little things at which it is fun to poke fun.
To subtlely transition into an anecdote, a popular topic the first few vacations back home involved the length of my hair.
I had been and still am intending to get the Locks of Love treatment done. My sister didn’t mind; my parents wrote it off as “a stage.”
For the record, they still do. But if there’s one occasionally unpleasant, double-edged truth about my grandfather it’s that he’s very explicit.
In that first meeting I don’t think he strayed much from the topic of how much my hair had grown since the last time I had a haircut. I felt like a sober flower child: slightly dejected, gloomily disappointed.
Why would I have that reaction?
“I have the hair clippers out back.”
“When your father and his brothers were younger, they always used to let me cut their hair.
Even your aunt let me cut her hair.”
“Those hair cutting places can get pretty expensive for just a cut. But I have those hair cutters just out back.”
“Your hair is getting really long.”
Sometimes I wonder if he disapproves of the long hair.
My grandmother, on the other hand, is either subversive or attempting her surprisingly effective reverse psychology.
She, however, has a much subtler way about things.
“Your hair is so long and curly. Girls would kill for your beautiful hair.” Thanks, Grandma.
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