Dear Santa

I stopped over to Leela's to say goodbye to her for another year and ended up staying for Christmas dinner. I’m writing because something her sister said this evening really resonated with me, “After living abroad you realize how little you need in this world.” This is how I feel, though I had not explicitly recognized it. Perhaps this explains my reluctance to obtain more furniture than can fit in my bedroom and my dismay at finding boxes in John’s packed garage with taxes dating back to 1974. I even expressed to my mother this year (who was somewhat offended) that I thought she had too many Christmas knick-knacks. I am somewhat of a saver, but I have recently been horrified by the home of retired couple I visited that was absolutely crammed with junk. I promised myself that I will never let my future home reach that state.

Related to materialism, we still try to convince ourselves that the holidays are about family despite the materialistic trend that has slowly been infiltrating the American Christmas more each year. The weird thing about family is that they often aren’t the people we would chose as friends, but we’re stuck with them for a long time. I feel as though I have little in common with Emily, except that we have nearly two decades of shared memories and traditions. And so it is more upsetting than I would have expected to break those traditions.

The presents sit under the tree untouched this Christmas because Emily has too much anger. My mother tries to ignore such problems but can't. She ends up becoming more entwined in such affairs than she would like, and instead, absorbs some of the fury until she proclaims that she can no longer live under the same roof as Emily. It takes a few days for her to calm down, but then everything will operate normally for another several months. Emily seems to have developed this seething hatred toward me, especially after I returned from Africa and interrupted her two-year existence as a spoiled, only child who still lived at home.

The other weird thing about family is that you revert to old habits. We still quarrel like children, even though we are adults and we carry the grudges of adults. I can't even remember what we fought about in February before I left for Connecticut, but Emily has carried that anger for the last 10 months and now refuses to even be in the same room with me. This meant she wasn’t going to be a part of our Christmas Eve traditions: dinner and opening gifts from family. Nor was she going to take part in Christmas morning traditions, and so my mom was too upset to carry on without her.

Emily spends most of her waking hours at work, but now it appears that she is not speaking to me OR mom. And now we wander around this house that seems to have a poisoned air. My dad had a bowl of cereal for Christmas dinner. The untouched presents are meaningless. I need so little in this world, but a functional family would be nice.