Christmas Creeps in anticlimatic

The creeps have blown in with this blizzard.

My mother, who is mostly estranged to me now since remarrying and suddenly acquiring four new grandkids to have REAL fun with, just canceled Christmas dinner on us her children for the first time in history, so she can have dinner with her ma and brother, our grandmother and uncle, instead. We usually do dinner together, all of us, but for some reason this year she’d rather not. Too many people, perhaps? Perhaps some interpersonal intergeneration conflicts I don’t know about? Either way, I don’t blame her for setting her own schedule, but it is a family first, and my brother in law and sister are taking it personally.

My two brothers that have kids are out of commission Christmas morning with their new family traditions blossoming. These kids bring with them an entirely new world that their parents are suddenly a part of and responsible for. Their old world has been taken away. My sister and I don’t have kids, so we are still lingering in that weird space when we were the World Bearers for our own parents, except our father is gone, our mother has a new life with a new man, and our two brothers have begun tangent world’s of their own to which we are now relegated to auntie and uncle peripheries.

I get these frequent memory flashes of my childhood home while I’m doing things around the house, usually scent related. Opening the dry goods cupboard and smelling the brown sugar and flour. The moment the ground beef and onion I’m cooking becomes fragrant. That combination of basement mildew and dryer sheets.

Families and homes feel like such rocks, but are so fleeting. Dissolving in front of our eyes. I can’t not see it now, everywhere I look. Every face I see. Makes me want to run around like that guy from Its A Wonderful Life in a manic frenzy, begging people to stop taking their lives for granted.