Incoherent Scribblings

A Christmas Story

Today’s story actually started a couple of weeks ago when I found out that we would be going to my cousin’s on Saturday, December 23.

My cousin’s oldest daughter’s birthday is on that day, so along with Christmas, she was going to have a birthday party this year. A person with a birthday so close to Christmas is likely to cause confusion for any family, but in my family it causes extra headaches because not only is my aunt divorced from my cousin’s father, my cousin is no longer with her oldest daughter’s father. As a result, there are always two extra families involved with this particular birthday.

Most of the time my cousin separates the birthday party from the Christmas party for her daughter, but for whatever reason that was not the case this year. It was therefore decided that my family wouldn’t do the Christmas part of the party until after the other two families left the birthday party since neither my aunt nor my cousin are on the best of terms with their respective exes.

This was all well and good, but for some reason unbeknownst to me, it was then decided that we would only unwrap presents to and from my cousin’s family and the presents to and from my aunt, uncle, and youngest cousin would wait until Sunday when they were coming to my mom’s house. Silly and confusing I know, but no one asked my opinion!

So then on Sunday, my aunt, uncle, youngest cousin, sister, niece, and nephew arrived at Mom’s house to unwrap presents. Mom and I thought that my sister was going to bring all the presents for everyone but my dad’s family to Mom’s house, but somewhere along the way our wires got crossed and my sister was under the impression that Mom, Stepdad, and I were coming to her house Christmas morning and exchanging our presents there.

Granted, my sister only lives two blocks down from Mom so we could have gone down and got the presents, but then Mom decided it sounded like a good idea to go to Sis’s on Christmas morning because she wanted to see what Santa brought the grandkids anyway. So once again we decided to only unwrap part of the presents.

The present confusion finally got sorted out last evening with Mom, Stepdad, and I planning to go down to my sister’s this morning to have a little Christmas with the kids and with me staying at my sister’s house until Dad, Stepmom, and Stepsister came for lunch and more presents.

I went to bed last night not with visions of sugar plums in my head, but thoughts of my tasty cream of broccoli soup since I had been “volunteered” to make it for lunch.

I was even awake this morning when the phone rang: It was my sister informing me that Christmas at her house had been canceled… Due to the fact that my niece had gotten sick in the night.

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope yours was less confusing than mine!