The Life of 'Rav...

A Little Something For Everyone

Holidays are never easy with my family. Especially when we have all the cousins, aunts and uncles and grandparents involved. Its just so many people and things never run smoothly. The good news is that this year, nobody ended up going to the hospital!!! That's a true achievement for my family. The bad news, family got drunk, I got into an argument with my father, which I won by the way . We hung out at the beach and told all sorts of old family stories, in which each of my dad's siblings get to embarrass one another and give their children ammunition .

And then there's Christmas day. Ugh. Nevermind what I said earlier about being the one day that me and my brothers can get along. There is no such day apparently. My brother Peter leaves for Marine training in 6 weeks. So my mom thought that it would be a good idea to get him his Christmas presents the weekend before Thanksgiving because she wanted him to be able to use them before he had to leave. He also got some smaller items to have something to open on Christmas day. However, when he saw that my brothers and I were getting more than he was for that very reason, he became very jealous and when he's unhappy, he gets violent. He was also unhappy that I was the one who had done all the Christmas shopping for my parents and he became convinced that I was bargain-hunting for their presents, which is very not true and it sucks that he would assume something like that. In addition, each year we pick one brother to get a present for. I got Peter. Great. I didn't know what to get him but then I saw a DVD of Balls of Fury, which is his kind of sense of humor I guess. I remember that he had seen that movie in theaters and liked it, so that's what I got for him. We usually have a rule of spending no more than $25 on each other so nobody feels stiffed. I also got him some movie candy to help with that. However, he found out that my parents were giving one of my other brothers Henry an iPod, since he was the only one that didn't have one. Peter had to get Henry a present and since he's going off to the Marines and doesn't need to save any money for the future, he went off and got Henry a $50 iTunes giftcard and an armband for his iPod since Henry runs cross-country. Nice going Peter. Way to set yourself up for disappointment. He was pissed at me for getting him "just a movie" even though he told my parents what he really wanted was Pineapple Express.....too bad it doesn't come out until January when we're back home!!!

So I tried to avoid Peter for the rest of the day. Not that hard since he had turned 21 on the 21st.....go figure that. And he usually stays up drinking with one of my uncles and then sleeping all day. Including Christmas day after presents were opened. However, we came back from sailing for a bit and I was helping my brother Henry with his iPod. The computer had been set up in the room that Peter was using and so we figured we'd do that while he had disappeared. He came back as we were finishing and yelled at us to get out of "his room". I've had enough of his crap, so I stood up to him and got punched in the face. Nice. Happy holidays!!! My ENTIRE family was downstairs when this had happened and everyone knew that Peter's temper was to blame. Fine, but I still felt like crap for doing something stupid like getting in his way.

So yeah, that's how a typical Christmas goes in my family. I'm looking forward to the next couple of weeks because things are going to get interesting. In the upcoming weeks, we fly back together to the States, I go back to school, Peter goes off to California for his Marine bootcamp and I go off to Egypt as part of my history degree.