An Unhealthy Haul
Plus: Episode Three of "Hey Brad, How's Australia Going?"
The kids were with me Christmas Eve for the first time. I had much anxiety about this. Would they come out of their bedroom to find the presents under the tree and exclaim, “My, what a healthy haul!” and tear into their gifts with abandon? Or might they frown and go back into their bedroom only to reemerge after a few minutes to announce, “Father, after a quick conference we have decided there are so few gifts that we don’t find them worth opening. Please save them for future birthdays.”
I do not know how to make Christmas feel adequately magical in a land where the seasons are upside down and snow does not fall. And as I have no extended family here and no chosen family to celebrate with, anytime I have my kids on Christmas it will just be us three. It’s fine for now while they’re small and only care about presents, but I wonder if on some future Christmas Eve we will be sitting on my couch watching Huntrx Xmas: A KPop Demon Hunters Christmas or something, and one of my kids will look around and yell, “I’m just gonna say it, this is fucking depressing!”
To create a snowy scene beneath my tree, which is about as short as my four-year-old, I bought 600 cotton balls, shredded them and gluesticked them to sheets of paper and lined these on the ground. The result was unsatisfying.
With my kids asleep, I was just getting ready to take the gifts (every last one of them purchased at Target) off the shelf in my room and place them under the tree when my six-year-old appeared complaining of tummy pain. I took her back to bed where she cried in agony while I asked ChatGPT if I should take her to the ER. It said, “yeah, probably. Or you can wait it out. But I wouldn’t. If I were lucky enough to be a human with a human kid and she had real-life human tummy pain, I would stop at nothing to ensure her survival. But you do you!”
I waited it out and Olive finally got back to sleep and I had just enough time to put the gifts under the tree before she was awake again, crying in further agony. I really should take her to the emergency room, I thought. But I didn’t! She fell asleep again and I remained in the bottom bunk with her little sister until 6am, at which point Olive woke me by opening her bedroom door to find whatever Santa hath wrought.
He drank the milk! He ate the cookies! He took the entire carrot with him to give to one of his malnourished reindeer!
The kids were medium excited by the amount of gifts, and yet Olive was quite listless as she opened them. She no longer had stomach pain, she said, but I could see she was not out of the woods, she was in some kind of discomfort. Perhaps I can blame her ailment on her dismal and ungrateful present-opening attitude. “I don’t like Dora anymore, you can have this, Lily,” she said as she tossed her new Dora the Explorer doll ($60) to her sister. “You didn’t even get me a Christmas dress?” she said after unwrapping the dress and Barbie romper (combined $45).
I can’t take offense. It was just a bunch of shit from Target. After I dropped them at their Mom’s that morning, I wondered if I should just throw all the gifts in a bag and take it all back to Target. They’d surely be closed but I could just leave the bag by the entrance (it’s not about the money, it’s about not having crap in my house). Would they even ask about these toys the next time they were at my place?
God, Christmas is awful. I went straight home and began dismantling the tree, threw away all the cotton snow-paper (sorry, Earth!), put the tree and the ornaments and the stockings and the stupid fucking Santa statuette from KMart back into my storage cage in the parking garage. The next day I purchased a plant and a pot for about $200 and put it where the tree had gone. I took my treasured Radiohead lithograph that I won in a raffle in 2001 from the record store I worked at and hung it up where I’d hung the stockings. Very happy with how my little writing area looks now.
The day after Christmas I got a call from Jen that Olive was still in pain and was also vomiting now and needed to go to the hospital after all. I met them in the emergency ward and we took turns walking Lily around, getting food and drinks from the cafe, and basically just hangin’ hard in the hospital! We were there about three and a half hours waiting for swab and blood results and were finally informed that Olive has the fucking flu.
Still, it was nice to get the family together for the holidays.
This week on “Hey Brad, How’s Australia Going?” I sit down with Melbourne comic Andrew Portelli, a fine fellow who is doing well for himself around here. The conversation was eye-opening enough for me that I went and did stand-up again for the first time in four months! Or maybe not doing stand-up was when my eyes were open and this conversation has inspired me to close them again, I’m not sure. Anyway, in the legendary words of Marc Maron, “Great talk!”