It’s a Laughed Family Christmas

Officially, it is a holiday in which we are permitted to sleep in, a tradition that usually goes like this: I am awoken my by brother stomping loudly up and down the hallway past my open door (he insists the stomping is just stomping, and not necessarily an attempt to wake me up). I turn over and sleep for five more minutes, until my mother comes in and wakes me up with coffee and tells me to get up because it is gezellig. My dad is spared of this until right before the festivities.Broseph and my mother make oven-croissants and cinnamon rolls in the kitchen, and I set the table (and yell at Broseph for not helping me set the table). We wake up my dad. My parents perch themselves on the couches, and my father says that he wishes it were snowing on Christmas, as it did once in 2003 and never has since. We listen to the New College Choir, and my mother tells me emphatically that if I were ever to experience a New College Christmas, I would definitely become an Anglican. I was actually baptized Anglican, when my parents still lived in Oxford, but it is the great religious tragedy of my family that American churches just do not do music the same way, and as a result my father has not been to church since 1995.Broseph asks if we can open presents; my father says that he is only just awake and dat wij even rustig moeten zijn (to be calm for just a moment). We wait for eight seconds and then Broseph says, “Present time!”. He and I crawl around the floor, fetching presents for each person one-at-a-time. The photos are almost always blurry and terrible, because

1. I have an aversion to flash photography
2. I always think we have enough natural light not to need flash
3. My mother doesn’t know how to turn on the flash on my camera

My parents always worry that one child has more presents than the other. Once, to resolve present inequity, my father wrapped a banana for himself, and since then it’s been a running joke to wrap one present so tightly that it hides in plain sight. This year, it was a dinosaur figurine, who merrily joined the manger for a few weeks and often offered piggybacks to Baby Jesus when my mother wasn’t looking.

My mom wants to take a nice picture of Broseph and me together.

We are uncooperative.

There is food. There is laughter. There is love, there is love, there is love.