I’m taking time out from losing at euchre and poker to wish all of you a Merry Christmas and happy New Year! I suck at cards, but you guys rock at being you. Have a great year!

(P.S. Thanks for the great pic, Kristen!)

Anyway, remember this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJvbZZWt9g4

At the beginning of the Christmas season, I’m very excited. We take a look at the Christmas savings account and budget out everybody on our list and we’re very committed to staying within the budget, which means if we want our kids to have a good time on Christmas morning after hearing us say no to them all year long, and if we want to donate anything like food, toys, or whatever to wherever, then we have to cut things out of the budget. No problem! Christmas is for the kids, right? Cut out buying for adults, and cut out sending Christmas cards to every person I’ve ever met in my whole life. Take another look at the budget and it looks gooooood! The kids are going to have fun! The kids are going to be able to pick out some things to donate! Our parents will get a picture of the kids, a kid-made craft and a nice note saying something to the effect of, “We gave your present to somebody else. Love you!” instead of a Snuggie. We feel good about this.

And then I start wrapping. And then I hear George Costanza in my head saying, “I gave him Yankee tickets, he gave me a piece of paper that says, ‘I’ve given your gift to someone else’!” And then I feel stressed. Not enough to return some of the kids’ presents in order to buy something for the adults because, dammit, Christmas is for the kids! Just enough to harass the kids into making more crafts. And to grow a nice zit. That’s all. (FYI, this close to Christmas, I can only say “Christmas is for the kids!” through clenched teeth with a crazy look in my eye. Sometimes I repeat it over and over while the children shush me and pat my head.)

Do you have Christmas anxiety that stems from a fictional character? Do you think maybe I watch to much tv? Do you go into debt to buy something nice for your mother  and she still says, “Is that how you’re wearing your hair these days?” If so, tell your story so I have something to read while I mindlessly play with my huge zit.

The maths are wrong, baby, cuz your hotness is rockin’!

Easter was lovely, except it needs to last much longer so my family can stay much longer and we can have, like, an 8-day feast instead of a weekend binge where we drink and eat too much and hurt ourselves. If we knew it would last longer, we could pace ourselves. I promise we would pace ourselves. My sister and I discovered that it doesn’t really matter what kind of wine a person drinks. If that person drinks too much of it, that person’s belly gets mad at them and punishes them. In other words, it’s not the quality, it’s the quantity. My sister-in-law is wise and she knew that already. She and my brother and brother-in-law, along with Bryan, were able to go to the Ohio Deli (as seen on Man vs Food!) and eat and eat on Saturday, while my sister and my mom and I stayed with the kids. Well, my mom stayed with the kids. Tracey and I just laid around and said, “Shhhh!” But now we know. Damn.

My Columbus friends were able to meet my family and that was lovely. I felt like I should be more nervous about it for some reason, but I wasn’t because Kristen, Dawn and Lynne are just Ohio versions of me, my sister and my sister-in-law. I don’t branch out much in my friendships. And the husbands? All of the husbands are beaten down by perfect matches for their loud and lovely wives, so we love all of them, too. Even my brother. I never found the bellybutton lint he hid here, but I have a feeling he hid it on my pillow. Just thinking about it gives me chills. Or, maybe he unscrewed the screen on the showerhead and put it in there so I shower in lint leavings every morning. Ew!

With that, I’ll leave you with another disturbing image. Everybody knows that My L1ttle Ponies love Easter. I just didn’t know how much they love it until I walked in the bathroom and found this little filly enjoying Maya’s Easter basket. In front of the mirror. Seriously, H@sbro, who designs your baskets*?

*I didn’t buy this basket. My mother-in-law bought it for Maya 2 or 3 years ago. I didn’t even notice what the little pony was doing until I saw her watching herself in the mirror with that look in her eye.

P.S. Don’t ask me what Maya’s basket was doing in the bathroom. Nobody wants to know.

2. More movies

3. More writing

4. More cowbell

So, I guess I hope I have a better year than the Parshallburg. Happy New Year! And happy birthday to my historic mother who turns 60 tomorrow.

I found the video here.

I’m sure life will go on as usual around here while we’re reveling, but whatever.

If I were the sort who sent out Christmas cards, I would totally send you one. But I’m not anymore because, for me, it’s all about the kid picture and my kids are all over the internets between here, Kids Know Stuff, and our Flickr page, so I don’t even bother anymore unless you’re an old person who doesn’t have the internet. Then you get one. If you got one and you didn’t know you were old, now you know.

I do like to give my brother and sister a holiday card, though, so I went to someecards.com and made one for them. It was inspired by true events. I’ll share it with you:

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We laugh, my family and I. And we laugh more when we drink. And we drink more when we laugh. It’s a vicious circle. Or a vicious cycle, depending on who you ask. Or whom. Whatever. I should be packing.

If I were a good person, I would have written something more like this, which when I found it in my inbox today from my friend Melissa, made me cry a little. So you all should watch this and pretend I wrote something like it for you. Because I would have. If only I had a soul.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_4qwVLqt9Q

Oh, and there are free guitars. I know the guitars are ruined by having Disney crap splashed all over them, but they are Washburn guitars! (Shh! Don’t tell Disney I said they splashed crap all over the guitars. They’re always listening). And you could put stickers all over the word parts and then you’d have a really cool painted Washburn guitar with your own personal stickers for flair. Hannah Montana does not own purple sparkles. Does she? She might, I guess. I would put this sticker on mine:

It’s a classic because it’s true.

We don’t have a lot of family traditions that have been lovingly passed down from generation to generation. I used to think it was just because my parents were kind of lazy and drunk a lot, but now I know the truth. Because I’m kind of lazy and drunk from time to time, too, but we still have some first-generation traditions.

My mom used to make cinnamon rolls once every few years on Christmas morning. I don’t really remember it too often from my childhood, but that could be because I wasn’t really into them back then. In the past few years she has told me that she made them every year, so what do I know? I know she used frozen bread dough and joked about how her insane mom used to make them from scratch. Adding to the “joke,” she’d say, “Of course, then she’d end up pulling our hair and calling us all sluts,” and she’d laugh. Hahahaha. “So, see? It’s better to use frozen dough.” So funny.

I like to bake, but I don’t do the cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. And it’s because I don’t want to pass down my grandmother’s tradition. Because she’s mean. And I don’t want her little mean pieces being passed on through her stupid, yummy cinnamon rolls. This is the first time I’ve really understood that her meanness is the reason I don’t pass it on. I know this because the one and only passed-down tradition I loved to cling to was my dad’s family tradition of Christmas Eve hot cocoa in a Santa mug. It’s a tradition from my long-dead Grandma Lena. I’ve written about her before. She’s the one that died when my dad was 14. I never knew her, but there she sits on her pedestal.

We did not practice Grandma Lena’s tradition when we were growing up. My dad had his original Santa mug from when he was a little boy and it was always used as decoration during Christmas; never for function. It wasn’t until, I don’t know, between 8 and 10 years ago, that all of his grandkids started receiving Santa mugs in order to carry out the Christmas Eve cocoa tradition. I, as the one who always craved this kind of tradition, jumped all over it enthusiastically every single Christmas. This year? I’m dreading it. I don’t want to pass it on. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to keep the Santa mugs sacred until the big day. I don’t want Christmas to come. I couldn’t figure out why there was this niggling dread in the back of my mind, but now I realize it’s because my dad is, this year and not for the first time, a big schmuck.

After my parents divorced when I was 12, I worked hard to get to a good relationship place with him and his second wife, whom my kids refer to as “Grandma.” Really hard. It took all the way until I was about 24 or 25, but it was good. It was good until last year when he left his second wife and her kids and grandkids for another woman. He sacrificed us, his first family, for this second family and then he left them. And I don’t like that. And I’m having trouble with him. And so I’m having trouble with his traditions. And now I know that this is what kills family traditions. Family connections are broken, so what’s the point of traditions? If that connection is gone and you don’t want it back, then you don’t need the traditions. It feels false to carry it on with my kids with the usual, cheery, “This is how Grandpa used to spend his Christmas Eve with his little brother and your Great-Grandma Lena,” because who cares? Who really cares? I don’t care.

*sigh*

But I will do it again this year. I will. Probably. Because it really has become our own tradition and, I think, being aware of the reason I don’t want to do it helps a little. It’s our tradition. Yes, my dad’s bits and pieces are all over it. And part of me believes that his bits and pieces should be shunned forever. But I don’t want to pass on our truest and most-followed family tradition: detachment. I don’t. I’ll make the stupid, yummy cinnamon rolls too. And I’ll tell the kids that their Great-Grandma Devereaux (the one that they’ve seen only a handful of times and, no, she’s not dead yet) used to make them, and their Grandma Marilyn used to make them and we’ll talk about traditions and sadness and detachment and connection and disconnection and how sometimes it’s too late, but how we can do better. It’ll be more fun than it sounds.

It will be just like when we make my mother-in-law’s peanut butter balls and we talk about how Nana gave us the recipe and she’s been making them for a looong time. And how we talk about Grandma Hattie’s cut-out cookie recipe (even though she was just my babysitter and not a real relative at all, but more real than most.) And how we talk about most of the ornaments on our tree. They all came from somewhere else. My parents made some of them together when they made folk art in the ’80s. The rest have been gifts from my mom, my inlaws, my dad and my ex-stepmom. There is connection all over this disjointed family, in spite of ourselves. And it’s ok to pass it on.