Meet the Griswolds
We just returned from spending Christmas in the frozen hinterlands, some 750 miles north of here, with my husband’s family.
Never mind all the drama that attends traveling that far, by car, with two adults, a 3-year-old and a dog that my husband refuses to leave behind (the dog, not the child). Let’s just deal with the idea of eight nights and seven days as houseguests, with all four of us (dog, too) sleeping in our nephew’s 10 x 10 bedroom. At least he got the hide-a-bed in the TV room. As I told my husband, I’m not sure I’d want to spend that many days in my own mother’s house, let alone someone else’s. At one point, I found myself in the basement, ironing 17 of my father-in-law’s flannel shirts.
They have a collie. And all I have to say about her is, “Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip!”
There was the younger sister’s fiancé and two of his daughters and one of their boyfriends, all sitting on the living room sofa, talking on cell phones, playing with iPhones and iPods (yes, an iPhone for a 17-year-old, and if you got one for your teenager, Shame On You.) This was the boyfriend, BTW, and if it hadn’t been Christmas Day, I might have thought it was Halloween. He was straight out of a Beastie Boys video – pasty white skin, visible underwear, and all.
There was Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day. There was lots of family and laughter and shrieking children and barking dogs. There were goats.
There was also snow. Pretty. White. Cold. And problematic for our rear-drive SUV with traction control. Christmas night, my husband had to un-stuck our SUV from a snowdrift and managed to put a shoulder-sized dent in the tailgate.
I had bought a rooftop cargo bag because we had so much stuff to take, and I knew we’d be bringing even more stuff back. (Asking my mother-in-law to cut back at Christmas is like standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon and pleading with the Colorado River: “Stop this erosion!”)
Thursday morning, mounting and packing this 15-cubic-foot cargo bag, with the temperature a balmy 23 degrees, we broke the zipper and a tie-down strap. Driving down the interstate, dented and dirty, encrusted with re-frozen slush, carrying our duct-taped cargo bag, I had the thought that all we needed was a bumper sticker about redneck relatives to go with our Arkansas license plate.
And finally, working at an Arby’s somewhere in the Midwest, there is a strapping, corn-fed young fellow named Tiny who, even now, does not know how close he came to peril, if only I had been able to make the laser beams shoot out of my eyes.
Happy New Year, Tiny.
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