Holiday tales of woe...add your own

[Kitsa]

Gather round, boys and girls.

My family's luck always goes to shit in early November and stays that way through January. Some cosmic thing, I guess. Almost all of the family deaths, right down to the dogs, seem to have happened the first week of November. We always get our bad health diagnoses then too. Dunno. I hate winter.

Anyway.

One winter my mom had a car accident, totaled the car and broke her right forearm. She was in a cast and couldn't do much, so my dad went out and picked the Christmas tree. Except it was somehow lopsided, no matter how he sawed the trunk, and kept falling over. It fell over 2 or 3 times a day, and every time it did another one of mom's heirloom glass ornaments would be broken all to hell. To this day I don't know why he didn't just wire it to the wall.

Finally one night the damn thing fell over one last time and he picked it up under his arm, threw open the back door and threw it off our deck, lights, stand, ornaments and all. My mom was crying and my brother and I had to go out into the woods in the dark with flashlights and pick all the ornaments and stuff off the tree. Good times.

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One Christmas when I was about 12, I was in the hospital for spinal surgery. They'd just put a halo brace on me (that's the one that's bolted to your skull) and I was still woozy from the anesthetic. All of a sudden, in comes this woman with a camera crew behind her, skipping right into my room.

I looked at her and looked at the camera. I was apparently supposed to be excited to see her but I didn't give a shit, so she autographed a picture for me and left. Evidently she was the host of some local afternoon kids' show. I don't know if I was embarrassing her on live TV or not, but seriously, lady, don't just go skipping into random rooms expecting us to wet our pants over you. Children's Hospitals are bad about that- lots of celebrities showing up for photo ops around the holidays.

Later I tried to entertain a kid who was scared of my brace by hanging a stuffed animal off of it. Then the stuffed animal wouldn't come off and the kid went into hysterics.


About a week after that, I slipped on ice and knocked all the bolts funny and they had to be screwed into my skull all over again.