We had good food, we had good beer, we had a 35-20 win over the Giants. (Think it's just me? If we'd have taken a family picture...which we didn't, because nobody has a wide-angle lens...you'd have seen more burgundy & gold than red & green.)
I've been worried that my niece and nephews were going to grow up with a certain lack of awareness of diversity, what with living in a very white suburb and going to Catholic school. I'm less worried. When my niece unwraped her Poly Pockets play set and saw a candelabra, her reaction was "Cool! Kwanzaa candles!"
I've been getting the feeling that my nephew's behavior notices from preschool aren't because he's a bad kid, but because he has the makings of Class Clown. (He comes by it honestly...the family party made me remember, duh, my dad and my uncles are all class clowns.) So I wasn't surprised when they encouraged my nephew's passionate rendition of "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells." Luckily my nephew does have a 4-year-old's attention span, and he forgot one uncle's instruction "Mommy loves that song, so you should sing it to her all the way home."
This is only funny in the context of another old family story: Nephew had escaped the rec room, where the party was, and had gone up to the top floor of my grandmother's house. I caught up to him in the guest room, where he was looking at pictures displayed on a shelf. Most were old family portraits, like one of my cousin (now pregnant with kid #2) as a toddler. The only picture that wasn't family was a Sacred Heart print. "Do you know who these people are?" I asked my nephew. He shook his head. I pointed to the Sacred Heart and told him "Well, this guy is Jesus." (Victor points out that I would have really spread some cheer if I'd said "Take it to Grandpa; he doesn't know either.")
We have a grab bag thing for the adults that is sort of hard to explain (although this page has a variation it calls the "Holiday Gift Grab"). There is a tradition in which alliances (generally spouses) form to try to either get a particularly coveted gift or to stick someone else with a particularly obnoxious gift. Another tradition is complaining about that tradition. My cousin and her husband were whispering before my cousin took her gift-picking turn, and one of the aunts said "Hey! No family planning!" After a moment there were guffaws from all four corners of the room packed with four generations of smartasses, along with comments like "Yeah, that's obvious."
Posted by Nic at December 26, 2005 07:16 PM | TrackBack