And so it begins

Holidays are always great because you end up with a big group of family that is normally never together but for the reason of that specific holiday. Thus, we end up with Keene Family Thanksgiving Week 2009.

My dad has one brother and two sisters. The brother lives in a town called Simi Valley, about an hour away from Long Beach when there's no traffic on the 405. That's a rare thing, the no traffic on the 405 thing, but we can always wish. My dad and his two sisters, one that is married and one that is a widow, live in Indiana. This Thanksgiving the Indiana part of the family decided to come to California. It's gonna be an interesting week.

Their flight got in a little after 6 on Saturday evening. We managed to get out of LAX a little before 7:00 and headed up to Simi Valley from there. My mother, who is not a drinker, immediately started pounding the chardonnay. My aunt and uncle that live here are regular drinkers ( but alcoholics they are not), and I think my mom was trying desperately to keep up. She failed miserably. About three glasses in she started talking with her hands, and with every point here and gesture there the wine kept coming closer and closer and closer to slopping over the edge of the glass. And it eventually reached that point, resulting in a huge splash of wine onto her pants and her drunken vehement denails that she wasn't in fact drunk, that she just talks with her hands and it was bound to happen. Bound to happen BECAUSE SHE WAS DRUNK.

I was viewing this show from my non-drinking armchair. My parents and my California uncle and aunt seemed to be highly disappointed that I wasn't getting sloshed with them, my aunt even going so far as to say "I told you that you needed to wait until January to try to get pregnant so that you could enjoy the holidays!" That point of view makes me think that people must have a waaaaay different perspective of me than I thought. When Edgar and I were at his friend's birthday party two weeks ago and I mentioned that we weren't drinking anymore since we were trying to get pregnant, they were all shocked and "Wow, that's got to be hard for you!" Just because I'm the only girl of the group that ever drank I guess that automatically made me the group's alcoholic. And then my family thinks that I need to be able to drink in order to enjoy the holiday season. Ok, yes, I miss the wine and the bourbon (OH MY GOD THE GOOD BOURBON) but I don't need it to enjoy my holiday. And I actually discovered that I can enjoy myself plenty being stone sober and watching a bunch of 50+ year old men and women getting wasted.

The best part of the story came the next morning from my dad: my mom apparently had to crawl up the stairs to bed, be undressed and then redressed in her pajamas by my dead, during which time she kept falling over, and then once that was done she laid down on the bed and alternated between moaning and giggling until she went to sleep. Oh, mom.

Let the festivities begin.