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Get This Damn Christmas Hat Off Me
A Christmas story of the scream that broke the holiday open
We’re always transients during the holidays. We’d go to any extended family that would allow us to spend time at their place. Christmas day was always the one holiday we didn’t have a place to go.
Until the year my grandfather moved in with my family, and once it was found out that he had a degenerative disease and an aneurysm was when we held Christmas finally at our place.
My mother never cooked for the holidays because she hated washing dishes, so that was her excuse. Christmas was scraps we grabbed at McDonald’s above the freeway on the way to Chicago. It was a hot dog joint that was surprisingly open on Christmas day and had condoms that I mistakenly thought were adult balloons sold in vending machines.
When we were forced to bring a big holiday dish, Heavenly Ham was a Midwest institution that made the best ham you could ever heat up. That’s what we did for Christmas, and I stayed out of my mother’s way as she moved around the house. We had my father’s family for Christmas; this was the first and only year we did this. Hospice came every day to check on whether or not my grandfather’s vitals were okay to which my grandfather would try to flatter the attractive nurse into taking her vitals instead.
