Christmas Gathering From Hell

"Confessions of the Son of a Holiday Goddess"

Samuel didn’t know how his tie got stapled to the wall. He just

considered himself lucky that he hadn’t been wearing it around his neck at the

time. It hung on the wall across the room from him like a macabre imitation of a

hangman’s noose, its tail having been stapled slightly higher than the knot and loop.

“Is this really my life?” he muttered, half-aloud to no one in particular,

had anyone been paying even the slightest amount of attention to him—which no

one was, as usual. Samuel was kind of grateful for that, too.

The holiday gathering had started out innocently enough, just as it had

for countless previous years. Everyone seemed glad to see everyone else, and they

were all jovially exchanging greetings, laughing and teasing together. By the time

the last relative arrived—Samuel’s bachelor Uncle Charlie—however, the event had

pretty much disintegrated into chaos and confusion…just as it had for countless

previous years.

The matriarch of the motley crew posing as Samuel’s family was his

mother, Leona. Leona looked harmless enough to unsuspecting outsiders as a

typical grandmotherly type with “shrinking woman’s syndrome” and graying hair, but

to Samuel and others “in the know,” she was Leona, Holiday Goddess….of war and

destruction, that is. One day a year, Leona was allowed to make the one thing she

was able to cook and not have it taste like burnt cardboard: the Christmas Turkey.

The perfect final product had been carried to the table and was presented with

much fanfare by Leona herself, who could barely even see over the silver tray it

rested on.

It didn’t take long after that for Samuel’s strange assortment of relatives

to begin in engaging in several lively, animated discussions amongst themselves

around Leona’s huge cherry wood dining room table. The loudest of these was

conducted by Uncle Charlie and his sister Melanie, who were arguing over who

should eat the last one of Auntie Sue’s famous buttermilk biscuits.

“You take it,” Melanie insisted.

“No,” Uncle Charlie countered. “You take it.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Samuel resisted the urge to grab the basket from the table and hurl the

lone biscuit at his Uncle Earl, who was ranting about the Government Conspiracy of

the Year, which this holiday happened to be something about nuclear waste and

children’s cartoons on cable television.

Samuel kept his head down and ate his meal as quietly as he could

manage. Staring blankly at his mound of mashed potatoes, he absently pushed

around a few of his fresh green baby peas with his fork.

Thhhhh----Wack! Tink!

Samuel jerked his head up, almost flinging his peas across the table

and into Uncle Charlie’s open mouth. That’s when he saw the tie, stapled like a

prophetic warning, to the wall. He laid his fork down, stood up in slow motion, as if

he were moving underwater, and walked over to his tie. He mused that it gave new

meaning to the term “tie tack” as he pulled the three staples from the wall with the

stubs of his half-chewed fingernails.

He heard stifled giggling from behind him, where the whirling dervishes

posing as his twin four-year-old nephews stared up at him angelically. He couldn’t

be sure, but he thought he saw one of them trying to hide an object shaped

suspiciously like an office stapler behind his back. Samuel sighed and returned to

the dining room.

Folding his mangled tie into a neat bundle and shoving it into his left

pants-pocket, he mused, again half-aloud to no one in particular, since clearly no

one was listening, “Lord help us all, but this is my life.” Uncle Charlie and Melanie

were still arguing as Samuel shrugged and sank back into his chair. Resigned to

his fate, it was obvious that all there was left to do was sit down and eat that biscuit.

The End