a green and brown christmas

green and brown xmas 09 [aka jerry springer xmas]

the spirit of the christmas season runs deep in my soul. i love this time of the year and enjoy all of our family traditions, but next year i am spending christmas in hawaii. my family is quite large and we always get together at granny and pappaws' house. we have several new babies in the family and chaos was reigning supreme. i call this the green and brown xmas 09. green because we produced the least amount of trash ever and brown, well you will see later. my dad is the official trash collector and believe me none of it stays in the house long. as my mom says if she sits still long enough she will be found in the trash can. i do not know if it was the economy, we did have less presents as we only focused on the children this year. or the fact we used less wrapping paper, but we did not even fill one trash bag this year. i also used some led, not lead lights,too. i am not a real green freak though much more a conspicuous consumer, so it must be the money. we gathered round the table as the children had their interactions. they are usually at granny's with her undivided attention, so the competition began. there were so many vignettes unfolding it seemed as if i was in a christmas story observing from the outside. like scrooge with the ghost of christmas past. i kept catching the overveiw of each dynamic event as it began to unfold. i have a very diverse family with four brothers, i the only girl. a preist, a hippy stay at home dad, a rocking drummer blue collar man, a career computer geek all met at a bar. oh! wait that is not the joke. they all went to granny's for xmas celebration. there i was watching it all unfold. mom walks in holding the remote,or was it the phone? my oldest brother talking to my younger about how he felt doctors had messed his legs up while trying to correct his pigeon toes as a baby. my older brother totally dismissed his argument. and the testosterone took over almost escalating to fistycuffs. as this started to move around the house my father called out to one of my brothers involved not knowing about the argument but trying to get help because his great grandaughter was choking on ham. my daughter, an emt in college, went to action and cleared her throat. my dad turned white and went outside running into the arguing brothers and he tries to explain the choking and gets rebuffed by the younger thinking he was siding with the priest. my youngest brother had brought his dog which none of us really appreciate. can you imagine the house with all the pets from all five households? no! leave pets at home if possible. anyway my mom was taking pictures and in one shot she got the dog pooping on the floor. we found out later my dad had tried to pick up what he thought was candy from the floor. smelled it a realized it was poop. he thought one of the grandchildren had pooped in their pants. he got on to the child and then had to apologize because it was the dog,. later wafting from downstairs comes an odor of poop heavy as a cloud this time it was the grandchild. this is the brown in the green and brown xmas. and to all a goodnight! we all went to our homes and called to check on each other. we talked out our differences realized the pressures and the build up had gotten the better of us. dad found the remote deep in the couch next to my brother the priest's special hat. his homily still inspired and all is well till next year. i have lived all of the christmas stories this year from its a wonderful life, scrooge and the grinch, but this is my story and my green and brown christmas. aloha christmas in hawaii 2010.