Christmas! I'd forgotten how burdensome it is. I'm not speaking figuratively. You get all these gifts, you drive home, it's late, also really cold, and you have to carry all this stuff in and it takes a lot of trips--garage to door, garage to door, garage to door but this time you have to do some rearranging so that there is room inside the door, then garage to door again . . . . Since it can't just sit inside the door, you next have to find a place to put it, an exercise that reveals burdens of Christmases past.
And that is just Christmas Eve. The next day, you're with the other side of the family, and at some hour--like when you're packing up to leave--the quality of being overfed, a literal fact attested to by a roiling gut, seems an apt metaphor for the whole experience. This is how it seemed to me five years ago, and now I have three young kids with sets of dueling grandparents and fawning aunts, so you can imagine.
I think maybe my in-laws understand. They came through with the perfect gift for me: a hundred-dollar (!) gift card to one of Minneapolis's best liquor stores. And I got myself a Modern Library Little Dorrit and a Penguin abridged version of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The post-Christmas period is looking pretty good.
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