THINGS WE HAVE LEARNED FROM HOLIDAY GATHERINGS

4. Likewise, fine to teach your six-year-old how to play Doom.

vs

capping regular dudes in "GTA:SA" is just pointless violence

7.  The perfect partner for a holiday dessert bread is a good, strong mug of coffee.

8.  Sometimes it can be fun to revisit old grievances, but only if the hatchet was buried a long time ago and the resultant poking and prodding is only done in fun.

9.  No matter what, it is never a good thing to compare one's own sister to a gorilla. ESPECIALLY during the holiday season.

10. It's rude to chat on the cell phone while sitting at the table eating Christmas dinner.

11. You never stop missing the loved ones who have passed on.

13. The best store-bought tamales are only 1/10 as good as the homemade kind.

15. Party with homos as much as possible

16. Imagine everything in a 10-foot radius of yourself is being videotaped for some kind of cosmic holiday reel for the ages, and act accordingly - this way you will be proud of yourself.

17. Life is short - you're capable

1. I'm 'ridiculous' for the following things: wanting turkey for dinner instead of pasta and fish, disliking penne with vodka sauce, wanting to watch A Christmas Story more than once in the same day, choosing not to use toothpaste with fluoride, messing around with my little sister's awesome new electronic saxophone, drinking bourbon instead of wine, having never seen The Apprentice.

4a. You can teach your five-year-old nephew to play Doom, too.

4b. It's better if you just show him how it's done, though.

19. You can order meat through the mail. They send you an icebox & everything.

20. Buying your stepson a Playboy calendar every XMas, and having him open it in front of his wife = not very couth.

21. Tis better to start drinking early than to never drink at all, even if your nephews ask why your breath stank.

22. If Mom starts asking why you're wearing jeans while everyone else "dressed nice", walk away.

102. If you put down presents handed to you every year and act uninterested, eventually people will catch on that you only do so because you want to be the last one with presents left to open. (i'm quite amused by this.)

104. Don't thank the neighbour for the box of chocolates until you've opened the package and made sure it really was a box of chocolates.

112. That we need to put the Christ back in Christmas.

113. That you can, in fact, make a bong out of a potato.

114. That the best way to react to the gift of a pasta maker is not to look around bewildered and ask, "What the fuck am I going to do with a pasta maker?"

123. I am SO getting my tubes tied.

124. I am also NEVER even THINKING about aiming to get drunk, ever.

125. Nor is that whole marriage thing looking like an attractive prospect.

126. In my family, all the decent, kind, hardworking males have either passed away or gone through life-threatening ailments, while the fuckwits, jerks, demons, bastards, and lazy pendejos survive, year after year, unaffected.

127. I have another Favorite Aunt! Yay!

128. A little tiny, inexpensive present CAN end up being an incredibly moving and wonderful gift.

129. I actually like a tres leches cake!!

130. Every family is filled with drama! Yay!

Haha, I think I might be guilty of this.

133. So are dolls that smell bad.

134. Not all Muslims hate dogs.

136. that air america must obviously be going out of business, since one can't tune into it in the western suburbs of knoville and because that's the only way it's ever described on rightwing radio

138. That tongue and lip biting do not cause nearly enough blood loss to bring on the otherworldly visions associated with autosacrifice, thereby greatly limiting their effectiveness as ways of blocking out the braincell-drowning, levee-breaking seasonal flood of "holiday conversation."

140. My mom's the only one that can tell when my uncle's drunk

141. I'm my uncle's favorite

142. My grandma likes to talk about crimes and graphicly describing murders at the dinner table

143. My grandma will make threats like, "I'm not cooking another holiday dinner ever again, you all can do it!" and not put them into effect.

145. Telling my parents I wont be home for xmas when I had previously said I was, is a surefire way to piss them off.

148. This thread makes me realize that my family is not as messed as I had once thought, my christmas was not particularly dramatic.

149. Laura Mercier makes the best foundation.

150. Social Security will remain solvent until 2060 if payments are equalized.

151. In Washington DC, all that matters is who you are. One need only spend a few hours there to leave with this impression.

152. In New York City, trouble will find you.

153. In Louisiana, poor boy sandwiches are made with debris (sp?), which is the stuff that falls off the meat as it is cooking.

154. [I saw a pair of slippers for bound feet.]

155. Kill Rock Stars and other small labels have songs available from the iTunes music store.

157. 'A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down'

158. If you give the dogs tidbits off your plate 'cause it's their christmas too', you're going to spend the night cleaning up skitters and stringy dog puke.

160. A Christmas dinner of spicy red curry shrimp, basmati rice, fried sea scallops, falafel, soup beans and cornbread, focaccia, tabouli, and dill new potatoes is not going to appease the traditionally-minded holiday season eater, and will inevitably be the basis for huge Xmas conflict...but you know what? FUCK THEM. SHIT IS TASTY.

161. When the youngest person in the house on Christmas morning is 26 years old, MUFUCKERS BE SLEEPING IN.

165. I do not sleep well in cold basements.

166. The hills are alive with the incessant sound of music.

how funny.

hey how come everyone's parents have a beef with the homeless?!

184 other good ways of causing arguments: suggesting that there might be moral difficulties with eating animals. or that it's stupid to claim that lavender oil is better than paracetemol because it "isn't chemicals".

185 i should be saving money for a house and a car.

186 i'm mad, because if i carry on like i am i'll "be forty and still be living in rented accomodation with c. and never having significant relationships" (my sister, again) (apparently my relationships are "not significant" because they tend to be with girls who don't intend to have children - like, wtf?).

i do get on well with my sister, but she also irritates the fuck out of me. i think i probably irritate her more, though.

I get to fly to detroit for Thanksgiving and my brother's wedding, where I get to meet my new in-laws and all their suburban detroit republican friends. My future sister-in-law's mom is rather politically connected, and kinda went nuts with the guest list.

What are the rest of you looking foward to?

the real test is my uk trip.

*uh no, the restaurant forgot to send them over.

Also announcing right before we ate that everyone had to go around the room saying what they were thankful for (having prepared something ahead of time but putting everyone else on the spot haha).

And watching 16 cumulative hours of the new Battlestar Galactica with my brother. People who say you can't go home again are wrong. Home is the best.

1) The "upper Democratic echelon" are really all Socialists(incl: Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and all the DLC folk), only you can't point to anything they've said or any single measure they've put forth to would actually signify a move in that direction. They're all secretive about this and encode everything.

2) Teddy et al are actually part of the crew who push for the "New World Order" and want there to be a one-world govt run by the U.N. Apparently, this is the sole reason why "they" always vote to have the U.S. with less of a "global footprint" in world affairs. Not to have more UN guys get shot at in iraq as opposed to just americans.

3) The only reason why the all the democrats are mad at the really fucked-up medicare prescription drug plan is because they didn't get any of the credit for proposing it. All other objections are mere pittances in relation to this anguish over not being able to take credit for it.

4) The environmentalists are the reason why all those poor farmers in oregon lost their land, and that Michael Cricton's State of Emergency was a good book. Why it's really hilarious to name a nefarious ultraviolent ecoterrorist villain leader "Nick Drake" is not understood. Also, all those environmentalists are wrong, since the oncoming ice age is realy just a natural thing that happened before in early Medeival Europe.

5) A guest worker program is fine, as is putting up a wall along the mexican border, but to really stop the flow of those folks, you have to get some National Guard troops out there to man the borders and shoot anyone who comes across. Why don't we just don't mine the entire region Korea/DMZ-style? Why, we'd have to go out and pick up the mangled and half-alive bodies. Any difficulties/conflicts-of-interest with having increasingly latino National Guard troops shooting to kill any poor-ass mexican folks are apparently not to be worried about.

6) The John Birch Society is still a little out-there.

Also, it remains to be seen whether the eldest son's efforts to trick this person into listening to Ed Schultz' show(b/c "Ed's only a little political, but he talks more about his dog, hunting, fishing, and pro football") will come to fruition or not.

Eh, whatever. I spent a day and a half off earlier this week putting together a DVD-R for my parents and grandparents of old videotapes of my sisters and I that sent me into a nearly week-long whirlpool of crippling nostalgia, so I think my presence will be suitably felt. That and the impending hour-long phone calls tonight and tomorrow.

Another lesson, the Saloon is actually sort of fun right before Christmas. Who'da thunk?

you rule more with every post i read

-- Pleasant Plains /// (pleasant.plain...) (webmail), November 26th, 2005 8:25 PM. (Pleasant Plains ///)

because dogs rule and football drools. oh, wait.

#206 When you have a secret nickname for your significant other, try not to use it at a holiday gathering. especially in front of their father.

haha, I've been enduring this bullshit, too.

also kids are immoral little shits but kind of amusing. We bought presents for them but didn't put tags on them, just threw them out into the crowd of kids and let them fight over them, it was like feeding pigeons. cannibalistic pigeons.

This may have been the best Christmas ever in terms of looking around the room and seeing people relatively healthy and happy. Family can be a really nice feeling sometimes.

221. No matter how hard you try, it is not possible to develop diabetes over the course of one weekend.

haha!