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The Red-Headed Diva Saves Christmas
Do not get drunk the day before you’re going to cook the family holiday dinner. Cooking spicy tacos while hungover is Not Cool. Ask me how I know. I dare you.
Because I’d hate to accept responsibility and spoil a perfectly good pity party, I should point out that the hangover was my brother’s fault. See, Lil Bro and I agree that gift cards are evil. They’re the “I don’t know you well enough to get you a personal gift, but I think cash is crass, so I’m going to give you plastic-cash that you can only use in one location. And it’ll be a different location than everyone else will pick. So while you’ll have enough gift money to buy, say, a really nice pair of show breeches, what you’ll actually end up buying will be some bubble bath from Wally World and a book from B&N and a pair of socks from Freddies. None of which are as nice as a pair of show breeches or as useful as, say, four quarts of oil and a filter, which you could have actually used, as the car is overdue for a change.” Ahem. At any rate, my younger brother and I hate gift cards. Cash or loot, please. No plastic.
Unfortunately, he’s one of those guys with impeccable gift sense. He buys you things you never knew you wanted. I once bought him a plastic cup and some bubble gum. He has never leg me live that down, and so on top of all my other holiday issues I have Lil Bro Gift Angst.
Which is how I ended up sitting on the couch last night, staring at his gift, and freaking out that it was, once again, All Wrong. And one cider led to another.
And this morning I woke up hungover and had to face the Skillet of Spiciness which… oh my. Not when you’re hungover. And then, despite two weeks of planning… actually, allow me to clarify that. I mean “two weeks of waffling about date and time,” not “two weeks of solidfying details and preparing for the event”… despite two weeks of discussion on what we were doing as a family and when and where, my older brother heard “Christmas Lunch,” not “Christmas Eve Lunch.” So he never showed.
Which was a bummer, because Older Brother shares my despair at finding anyone the perfect gift, so we could have huddled in a corner and commiserated and plotted ways to undermine Younger Brother’s perfect gift giving skills.
And, of course, without Older Brother there, we delayed the present exchange until tomorrow. Which means I have 24 more hours of Lil Bro Gift Angst to get through, and he left an interestingly shaped and probably perfect gift under the tree for me. Argh.
All in all, by the time the afternoon wrapped up, I was exhausted and wrung out. Not really for the reasons in this post, but not everything in one’s life needs to be blogged. More than anything else, I wanted to go to bed for two weeks and ignore the world, but it was out to the barn instead.
Where the Diva (formerly “Her Highness,” but this nick suits her better) uncharicteristically hung her head over my shoulder and let me stand with my arms around her neck and let everything else go for a few minutes.
Maybe Lil Bro’s gift will be a disaster, but that’s why they invented gift receipts. (Don’t tell me about “it’s the thought that counts”–you’d only have to see my brother’s face after some of my gifts to realize he’s trying to figure out what the hell I was thinking.) And if Older Bro missed today’s get-together, well, we just do it all over again tomorrow. With pizza. And for everything else that’s going on… well… it goes on. But there are always ways forward, even if they aren’t clear yet.
Aren’t horses remarkable? Not only because they can help put everything back into perspective by just standing there and letting us lean on them… but because Miss Standoffish Diva, of all the horses in the barn, was the one who knew what I needed.
Merry Christmas, indeed.
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On Dec 26, 2006, RiderOne said:
LOL! Alcohol! Holidays! What’s UP with that, eh?