Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Christmas

Time for a Christmas post!

Growing up my Aunt Mary would come up from Arizona to Seattle and do Christmas at my house.  To make the present situation easier she would bring clothes and my mom would get me toys.  This system worked quite well for a number of years and I was always happy.  Some toys (necessities) and some clothes (frivolous sh*t).  When I was 5 or so the family decided to go to my Aunt's house in Tempe and have a warm Christmas by the pool.  Awesome! I get to play with new toys and I get to play in the pool.  It was a great time with family but the whole time I'm looking at that tree and all of those presents.  Let me at 'em!

Finally it is Christmas morning and everyone else is awake around 9.  Sidenote: I would wake up at 6am every morning growing up.  When spending the night at a friend's house I would need to be given some comic books or something to keep me distracted so I wouldn't wake up my friend hours before they were ready for the day.  This usually didn't work very well, I would play for maybe 20-30 minutes and then I would start to bug the crap out of whoever the friend was until they were awake.  How would I bug them? Just the usual, lightly tickle their eyelashes or put my fingers just under their nostrils so that they would be in a constant state of annoyance until they gave up.  What can I say? I love stupid games. Ok, back to the story.  It's 9am! Time for presents! Oh my shit, there are so many for me! I tear through the first one like an animal...a sweater.  Haha alright, first one is clothes, that's cool.  I wait patiently for my turn to open another one and then I just shred it open...a t-shirt.  Not what I wanted but there are still more.  Round 3...a turtleneck, uh toys please.  Round 4...socks, ok what the f*ck is going on? Fast forward to like round 7 and everything has been clothes.  I am completely distraught.  This is the worst Christmas ever.  Everyone is pleading with me to open the last present but I won't do it.  I now know this stupid game.  I cry to everyone in the room, "It's probably another pair of pants!" and I turn to the couch and start crying.  Luckily it was an etch-a-sketch but that was the only toy I got that year.

So apparently there was a miscommunication between my mom and my aunt.  My aunt thought they were doing the status quo while my mom thought that since we were switching locations we would be switching present duties.

There is a photo from that morning in one of my mom's photo albums somewhere.  Everyone is smiling around the tree and there is me off to the side with my face buried in my arms as I lean against the couch crying.

Merry Christmas!  I hope you get some toys.

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