Monday, November 16, 2009

Fruit for Christmas

We’re a big family, three aunts on both sides, one uncle on my mother’s side and two on my dad’s side. And they all have kids. We spend Christmas time in New York at my uncle Ben’s. Mostly because it snows in New York and also because his house is the only one big enough to fit all of us. It’s just the right size too. We have just enough space to avoid stepping on someone.

The Christmas tree is huge and we try to have ours up and decorated as early as possible. My aunt Linda has a habit of putting Christmas fruit under the tree before Christmas. She thinks it will curb our enthusiasm for present opening and keep us calm.

It doesn’t we enjoy her early Christmas gifts and continue to find where mom hid the gifts for Christmas. It’s become a tradition with us. We have a lot of crazy traditions. Like leaving our shopping till the last week and always going shopping together. With such a big family, Christmas shopping is a complete fiasco. Every year we’re surprised why we haven’t lost someone at the mall. Maybe we have and with all the people in the family, no one’s noticed yet. Another tradition is the ‘Family Christmas Photo’. My granny loves this one.

The whole family, over twenty-five of us in our Christmas sweaters squish together to fit into the 6 x 4 frame. We have ten years of family Christmas pictures. Of course if anyone were to look at them very closely, they’d discover a little secret of ours. The family’s bad joke as we call it. They will find our cousin Barney. They will find him in the first ten pictures and hen he will suddenly stop appearing in the rest. Cousin Barney is the Families bad joke. He’s a complete prankster. We see him every day but on Christmas he is banished by order of my grandmother.

Five Christmases ago, while waiting for dinner to cook, Cousin Barney ate his way through three Christmas fruit baskets. With so much chocolate in his blood, his practical joke pulling abilities were sharpened. So while we all squished together for the family photo, he ran out yelling, ‘Fire! Fire!’ the neighbors called the NYFD who hosed our Christmas tree down with water only to learn that there was no fire. Since then, Cousin Barney does not come over for Christmas. His Christmas gifts are delivered to him two days in advance. Aunt Linda always sends him Fruit for Christmas to remind him of what he did. But I think over the last five years, he’s been repenting. His gifts are

usually novelty items but this year he visited my aunt Linda and gave her such an exquisite and Unique Christmas gifts. It was a fruit basket but it looks more like a fruit bouquet. Aunt Linda forgave him immediately and even started asking grandma to let him come over for Christmas dinner again. But Grandma wasn’t moved until he sent her a nice Edible Christmas gifts as well. It was proof that he had indeed seen the error of his ways. Grandma forgave him and he is once again allowed to come and enjoy Christmas with the rest of the family.