Over The River And Through The Woods

On Christmas Eve sometime in the seventies
My cousin was sitting on my father's lap
And he told her that not all kids received presents on Christmas.

My cousin who was about three at the time started crying.
My grandfather (a good man and a gentleman) ripped my cousin off my father's lap and said something like she doesn't have to hear that. She's three years old for God's sake. I never saw him so mad.
My dad said something like the kid needs to know the truth and a fight commenced that drove my father to tell my mother that he was leaving and never coming back because he couldn't handle all this middle-class bullshit.

My father and my uncle Jim went to a bar.

I have spent a couple Christmas Eves in a bar and it's not that bad. For instance you have a perfectly good reason to feel sorry for yourself and everybody needs to feel sorry for themselves once in a while (whether they admit it or not) and it's nice to have a free pass to do so and being in a bar on Christmas Eve is a free pass if there ever was one. It's you against the world and that is kind of sad but also liberating. Christmas Eve in a bar makes you feel like a man with nothing to lose and that always makes the drinking more poignant and so what if you're alone, that's how your going to die anyway and it's good practice (if nothing else) for the inevitable.

My dad was back in the morning and we all pretended it never happened.