My Uncle invited himself to Christmas, and I don’t know how I feel about it. I guess the kids would say I’m triggered. Side note- I’m 36, and I feel hella old. I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t know how to use my phone, I have no idea what anyone is talking about, and I am not in touch whatsoever with anything in current pop culture because my playlist consists of everything I used to listen to in high school. It’s a wrap for me, I guess. Anyway, I digress… My Uncle, yeah, that’s what I was talking about.
TECHNICALLY he didn’t invite himself. I invited him. And my son… My son invited him also, because my son is becoming an amazing human being day by day, and that astounds me in the best way possible… Watching him “become”.
MY UNCLE. That’s what we’re talking about. Please keep me on track. I need an accountability buddy.
My father’s side of the family is huge. My father was one of 12 directly, and apparently my great grandfather was a sleaze, or so I’ve been told, so there is way more of us than 12 on the island. My father has lots of Uncles, Aunts and Cousins that I’ll never know. But stateside, I’m one of the few remaining that are local. Most of us have moved two states South, or 3 to 4 states north… or they’ve returned to the Caribbean. Me… I’m rightfully down the street. 15 to 20 minutes tops. And despite that, my Uncle has never once taken me up on an offer to visit my home. This year after the last of us moved too far to comfortably drive, especially given that Christmas is on a Thursday, my Uncle has declared that Christmas is for families and that includes me this year.
I guess it’s better to be the last choice than no choice at all. That sounds depressing, but it’s not because I had been removed from this side of my family for over 20 years, only to reconnect after my father died 5 years ago. Geeze, that feels like it happened just yesterday. 5 years sounds so far away when you say it out loud, but it still feels very present day.
After he passed, I reconnected with my family out of necessity as you would expect. There are a lot of things to handle when a family member dies, especially when that family member was the oldest living Patriarch of 12. And my family looked at me like the missing link, many of whom hadn’t seen me since I was toddling, searching to find pieces of my father in me… Imposing parts of him on to me that I am not sure are really there, or maybe they are and I’m so disconnected from HIM that I can’t find him in me. Or maybe just the ugliest parts. That, again, I don’t know. My father and I had a very complicated relationship… my relationship with my parents is complicated and poor generally.
My father died 5 years ago right before Christmas. I remember flying out to bury him and coming back trying to suppress my grief while opening presents with my son. And then, my father’s birthday was at the end of January. Of course, he had to make this entire holiday season eternally all about himself. Selfish. Christmas and New Years forever tarnished… tainted with a yet another bad memory and the effort of suppression to in an effort to comfort the family, when all I’d like to do is skip over it and sleep till Spring. For the last five years I’ve sought hard to find the joy that has since been riddled with death.
His death healed so much trauma in me that I’d carry my entire life. Sometimes the body heals wrong though.
Wow. I went on and on and on…
Back to my Uncle.
He didn’t invite himself over to Christmas, but he stopped by randomly after a year of pretty much no contact to bring Pasteles because he knows I love them and invite me to be his +1 at someone else’s Christmas gathering. I couldn’t NOT invite him to mine, but to be honest I didn’t expect him to agree to show up. And I have no idea what to expect when he comes. If he comes. I don’t know. What I DO know is that I finished my Christmas shopping a long time ago and now I have to go find gifts for my family that I don’t really know, and I have to feed them on a day that I really wanted to kick back and relax on.
I work retail- I’m a store manager for an upscale lingerie boutique, and we have been extremely busy this year generally speaking… but this holiday season has tested my emotional capacity for people. People are miserable and forget that we are more than just service people… When we get off, we have families to go home to, presents to buy, dinners to cook… People are very entitled and inconsiderate these days. It could be said that people have always been that way towards retail, hospitality and food service workers, but I think this year is particularly bad. That’s a rant for another day.
I just…
I need 2026 to be different.
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