My mother would tell us a story every so often that her friends next door, when she was a kid, got coal for Christmas. But it wasn't because they misbehaved or lied or failed to eat their dinner. It was because they were poor. My mom's family was poor, too (4 kids and a drunk father who left eventually), but all they ever suffered through was Velveeta Mac n' 'cheese' and rabbit's from the back yard passed off as chicken. My mother thought it was really unfair that her neighbor's parents were so cruel that they told their kids they were too bad for presents instead of just giving them something. So, I knew my sister had to have been really awful to get nothing -- not EVEN coal.

Life in Roskos-ville was not all terrible, but Corrin was in trouble a lot, often for small things (the spoonful of moldy peanut butter that had ripened and grown ants in her dresser drawer) and big things (coming home at 1 a.m. and blasting her radio. her room was next to my parents'). But I had thought that this year she had behaved according to the awkward but mostly achievable standards my parents had expected. She had a polite boyfriend, Andy, whom she had met through Youth Group (some creepy Christian cult thing for teenagers who have urges to do bad things). Andy didn't wear black eyeliner or longsleeves to cover up the multiple cuts on his wrists. He didn't scream things like "Feel the pain!" before biting people on the shoulders or legs. These were all things the other friends and boyfriends did, the ones who weren't invited back after the first time they were barely invited in. So, I thought Andy was a good influence and that he was keeping Corrin out of trouble. Or at least helping her create the 'illusion of good behavior' (oh, if that's not a book title, I don't know what is!).

So, on that dark Christmas morning I sat and thought, quite deeply, about how angry and disappointed my parents would have to be with Corrin to have shut her out of Christmas completely. This was THE holiday in our house. It was just one or two years previous that we had gotten up at six o'clock and our mother told us to go back to sleep and wait until seven. At 6:59 my mother was banging on our doors scolding us (with a smile) for sleeping so late. She was just as excited as us (my father, much less so. Holidays during his childhood were all gray sweaters and silent nods of approval.)

We didn't celebrate anything with the same enthusiasm as the re-scheduled birth of the Lord of Christians/pagan winter festivals. My dad, who was Catholic, seemed annoyed that my grandmother forced us to go to church before opening presents every Christmas Eve rather than just allowing everyone to eat and be merry (the drinking is handled by certain members of my family. the rest of us can only sit back and watch the chaos). Christmas just comes down to giving presents for us. Sue us for our consumerism! You'd lose because my mother, my sister, and I have all made our own Christmas gifts many, many times. But we've also spent our fair share of cold hard cash to get the gift with the best story. As we've gotten older, the gift giving becomes more about the silly story than the actual gift. even if the silliness is unintentional. A few years ago I bought my father a 'golf range finder' from Radio Shack. It was a cheap piece of shit that allowed you to estimate the distance of the green. Well, when my dad opened the box to test it out he discovered that the box was empty. I had purchased the box belonging to the display copy! We laughed and laughed. And of course, by the time I got back to the Shack, they had none left. This year, I bought him another one. I'm going to check the box as soon as it arrives.

When I was in Elementary school I would get $25 from my mom to buy her and my dad and my sister Christmas presents at the school holiday bazaar. This usually resulted in many, many cheaply made crafts, some imported from China, others glued together by wanna-be artists who had abandoned their craft to squeeze out kids and marry men with wiry hair on the backs of their necks. I used to get so excited about the gifts, though, that I'd try to give them long before the big day. I remember working very hard to wrap a tiny panda pin. The result was more tape than paper. And the next day I was pleading with my mom to open it. We Roskos-folk have some weird thing about giving people gifts, which makes Christmas a lot more fun. Strangely, birthdays are never as amusing. Perhaps because on Christmas, everyone get something.

All of this is comforting now, but on that one Christmas morning there were some serious issues. What was my sister going to do, just sit there and watch? I'm sure she'd be disappointed, even though she might be getting 'too old' for Christmas, the way that I got 'too old' for Halloween my second year in college (probably because I went trick-or-treating with a costume made of gorilla gloves and a torn flannel shirt. I didn't plan on dressing as the 'mad masturbator,' but I think I did).

Instead of torturing myself, I went back up to sleep and waited for my mother to wake me up. Maybe she wasn't done putting the gifts out. Maybe. I figured if Corrin woke up and saw there were no presents for her, things might get sorted out and I could come down and join them after the awkwardness. Much of my adolescence would actually become a variation on this plan -- avoid the chaos, keep the peace, make no trouble.

But this Christmas was simply a false alarm. As it turned out, my sister had come home late on Christmas Eve with Andy and my mom had already put the gifts out. They opened stuff together and Corrin had brought her stuff up to her room. It was a simple enough explanation, but the conclusions I jumped to seemed so reasonable. We all had a good laugh at my -- and my sister's -- expense. "You thought she was so bad she didn't get anything?" The very fact I believed this was a bit insulting to Corrin, even though she would later tell me that the image of me panicking in the early morning light of the Christmas tree was pricelessly pathetic. "You know we'd never do that!" My mother explained, herself a bit insulted that I'd accuse her of such cruelty. "Haven't I ever told you about the kids who lived next door to me?" She had. But she did again and we all felt better knowing there were people out there who really had screwed up Christmas for their kids.