preconceived notions about the undead

It feels good when the visiting part of the holidays ends.  On Christmas Day we went to Shawn's stepmother's sister's place, which is just as insipid as it sounds, spending the evening with people we see only a couple of times a year and with whom we have no real relationship.  A and A were fighting, which made me uncomfortable, and I find male-A disturbing even at his best, let alone when he is red in the face and making sarcastic comments and squabbling with female-A over who last changed their baby (whose eyes, by the way, are strangely close together).  And female-A is openly rude to her grandmother, who suffers from dementia, and thinks it doesn't matter because she cannot remember it later anyway.  I am fairly certain male-A is taking steroids, which makes him heavier but certainly not taller, and it doesn't pull his eyes any further apart from each other either for that matter. 


J captured a brilliant shot of me and Shawn at the dinner table in which I am leaning on my elbow and looking vampiric and utterly miserable, and in the background, Shawn's eyes are glowing like a devil's.  We appear to be a supernatural couple sent from hell to ruin Christmas.  Now we have met our obligations and can spend what is left of the holidays lying around and eating chocolates.

At one point Dr. B was talking about his adventures in Christmas shopping for his fiancee, which reminded me of The Gift of the Magi, a story I thought was required reading for every high school student in the country.  Apparently it is not, because every person at the table, all sixteen of them, turned to stare at me in confusion when I tried to make the correlation.  (This joke would have gone over like gangbusters with my family, but one of them would have surely beaten me to the punch.)  Only 364 days 'til Christmas!













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