Small Calamities

Your Calamities

Drinking In the Festivities
December 27, 2005 | permalink

A lot of people have Christmas Eve traditions. Some people decorate the tree, others go carolling or to services... at my Mom's place, we get drunk.

All day we have relations in and out; giving gifts, having coffee, coming early for dinner, staying late for supper (or both)... the usual holiday mayhem for any large family, I'm sure. So afterwards, we wind down. (We being me and my sisters, my Mother and Red, and my step-brothers The Architect and The CO, and my step-sister Cat.)

It starts with a couple of rounds of board games with drinks, and usually degenerates to just drinks after that. Sometimes it ends up as drinking games, even... Ever played Asshole with your parents on Christmas Eve? It's fun.

This year Christmas Eve was particularly hectic, so we all were looking forward to the drinks a little more than usual. Plus all six of us kids were there, which hasn't happened in years (The Architect lives in Fresno and Cat lives in Virginia), and Red's sister, Auntie Redneck, stayed to hang out with us after everyone else left.

It started out fine... some of us with beer, some of us with wine, some of us with The Star's concoction of Goldschlager and apple cider. Auntie Redneck started to get a little tipsy, and told us all in great length (and at great volume) about the bar brawl she got in this summer... aparently some 'trashy bitch' kept putting her paws on Uncle Redneck, and refused to heed Auntie's polite warnings. (Just to clarify, this is a fifty year old woman I'm talking about here.)

As she rolled on with her story, we got rowdier and rowdier. By the time it ended, the Goldschlager was making the rounds of the table, all of us taking slugs out of the bottle. After the second round, things started to get really ugly. My sisters and my parents bowed out of the heavy drinking, but stayed for the hillarity that ensued. Me, The CO, and Auntie Redneck kept passing the bottle. The Architect started making noises about going to bed. Bad idea.

Gentle Readers, I have seen peer pressure in action before, but it was nothing compared to the drunken baiting that Auntie Redneck (remember, fifty) laid onto The Architect. He was accused of losing his touch, of having no balls, of being California-pansified (my personal favorite) and a half dozen other things that I can't remember for having been laughing too hard. (My Mother, by the way, was laughing along with everyone else.) It degenerated to drinking by bargain- I'll have another if you have two, and Auntie Redneck has to pound her beer... and so on and so forth. It was a bad scene. I think we only stopped before we finished the bottle because The Star took back her Goldschlager so she could have more of her apple cider drinks the following day.

Anyway, that's how we roll at Mom's...