This Is My Blood: 2° Below / Voodoo Ranger

the only pic I took on 12/24; it was that kind of night

For the first X years of my life, before the extended family exponentially grew and the patriarch and matriarch moved out of a house and into a more manageable apartment, the tradition was to spend Christmas Eve with aunts, uncles, and cousins at Grandmom and Grandpop's house in Lawncrest. A myriad of sub-traditions flourished, many of which I already documented a few years ago. My Aunt Mary Tease took up the helm for the years immediately following the abandonment of Lawncrest (and so did Uncle Jim at least once, from what I recall), and then, as more great-grandkids started to populate the party and threaten to overtake everyone else, my parents opened their abode. It's a pretty big house, but not big enough to fit 75 people comfortably—Xmas Eve has been a crowded affair for years.

But anyway, when I was younger, I didn't quite appreciate the Eve's traditional gathering as much as I probably should have. I was always on the outskirts of the party. This was due to a weird combination of being left out of my cousins' merriment (1a being the fact that they were all older, 1b being they actually hung out together on weekends, and not just during major holidays, so there was a bond of actual friendship between them that I didn't share) and just generally having been afflicted with shyness in my youth. Whose fault it was—mine—is besides the point. I'm just saying it's true, is all. I felt out of place on Christmas Eve.

And it was a bad time to feel out of place, because the 24 hours immediately following Grandmom and Grandpop's party were some of the best hours of the entire year. The excitement of going to sleep the night before Christmas! Waking up and getting some cool presents! Spending all day playing new video games and riding new bikes! That special and deep feeling of cheer that pervaded the entire day! I was always anxious to get it all started, and yet I was forced to wait an excruciating number of hours in a place where I was kind of uncomfortable before any of the good stuff happened. The 8 PM Christmas Eve battle with my dad to wrap up his goodbyes in under 45 minutes was always an epic affair.

Of course, with time comes understanding, and as the years slip by, I'm starting to see a bit more nuance in that perennial conflict between my dad and me (and my siblings—though I don't want to speak for them, I can probably say that they were in my position, shy and a little left out and just wanting to get the fuck out of there). Part of it comes from the fact that I've been at one hundred parties in the past decade where I found myself on the other side of the fence, where I've become the nagged instead of the nagging, and that sucks, to have to leave a party before you're ready to leave, so yeah, I guess I get a part of where my dad was coming from. But that's not all.

 

You see, I am now the father of a child who, by all accounts, seems pretty shy so far. Part of that can be blamed on the pandemic, sure—not having extended interactions with anyone beside mommy and daddy and infant sister for almost an entire calendar year will probably affect one's social abilities. And honestly, the only people she's not shy around is her cousins, which means the comparison to my own single-digit years is even less 1-to-1 than I was originally thinking.

I've seen enough, though, to be able to extrapolate and wonder what would happen if I found myself in the father role during a family party, one that was fun and merry and where I found myself surrounded with the people I care most about in this world, and then my nine-year-old Willow is pestering me for an hour to please leave as soon as possible thank you. I would probably do the same thing I did with Pam for all those pre-children years: say "yes, okay, we're leaving" and then string 'em along as long as I can.

But then there's also the other concern, the reason behind the kid wanting to leave ASAP. The shyness, the inability to fit in. I guess if we're being honest, this was always the important conflict, though I kept it more to myself. The conflict being my dad taking offense, or at least outwardly implying some kind of embarrassment, over the fact that his son is the one who is not getting along with the extended family, who doesn't want to be there, who CLEARLY isn't making any EFFORT to make it work. There were lots of "why don't you go play with your cousins?" and "go ahead, see if they need another person on their team" and "why are you up here I thought all the kids were downstairs" and a general pressure to be part of the gang, as if it were up to me, as if overcoming shyness was easy.

I see the signs with Willow, meaning that I see myself in Willow, at least in this particular context. And I already know that I will feel the same way that my dad felt when he saw me, seemingly on the outskirts of the family gathering—a certain sense of sympathy that your child seems unable to join in on the fun. But I hope that, even if Willow is like that, and even if I do become sad at it, I hope that I will be able to react differently than my dad did, being as though I will also have a bit of empathy alongside the sympathy. I've been there. I know for a fact that pressuring a shy child to all of sudden not be shy somehow is not the way to go about it. It just creates some deep-seeded residual self-hatred in the kid that apparently only seeps out twenty years later in a blog post.

Also, I feel like maybe I would have the foresight to know that any child who behaves that way is going to realize eventually that they were wrong, and kind of being bratty, and really should have made more of an effort to have fun, as uncomfortable as it would've been. I put no blame on my cousins or my dad or anyone else for making Christmas Eve a largely distressing affair. That's all on me.

I may have overshot another point I was trying to make by bringing up my own kids, so let's back up. We're missing a piece here. There was a whole half-decade in between everything I've talked about, years of Christmas Eves when I actually did try to make things right—or at least bearable—by what I see now was a bit of a cheap shortcut. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the reason we are all here in this particular blog column—GETTING DRUNK.

Cheap light lager—the great equalizer at family gatherings. Why work through your shyness and try to become a better person when you can just plaster over the deficiency with ten to twelve beers? In the short-term, around my peers at school and in the neighborhood, I was starting to find that, the more I drank, the more I was becoming the center of the party (long-term, this was a disastrous plan, but that's an argument for another day). So I figured I could apply these same tenets to the one party that traditionally gave me the most anxiety and grief each year.

It was... not bad! I'm not going to say that my cousins became my best friends the day after I picked up the bottle and shared it with them, but I definitely didn't feel quite so out of step with them. Probably more of a relief was just the ability to not immediately want to leave a party as soon as you get there? Which felt pretty good. Even with like 25% more of an ability to relax and just hang out with the gang, the pressure was gone completely from my pops. He was drinking with his siblings, I was given the green-light to drink with my cousins, and when everyone was mutually ready to leave, we left. So there was that.

It's interesting, though, that alcohol was the one thing that could bring us all together (or, the one thing that could bring me into the fold, temporarily, if that's how you want to view it). As I get a little older, I wonder if that was the right crutch to lean on, because now I'm still going to family parties (insert the COVID caveat here) and the situation is completely different yet again, with kids and actual responsibility, and all I want to do, still, if get a little drunk and feel at ease. 

I wonder sometimes if genetics have something to do with it. I've always seen everyone in my family as staying just inside the boundaries of alcoholism, but I wonder if that's 1) an alcoholic's perspective, 2) giving away the game, that I'm still on the outside, not really understanding my family, 3) simply the truth. Maybe all of my aunts and uncles and cousins have all had their own private reckonings with alcohol, just as I have had in my life. I just think it's curious that alcohol was the one thing that helped me to view Christmas Eve as a truly family affair, and I wonder if anyone else feels the same way.

 

This is probably why, after 2.5 beers tonight, and after the kids were snuggled in for their last sleep till Christmas, and faced with the prospect of putting together a children's kitchen set for close to three hours, and faced too with a fully stocked fridge of beer and not many of the 550 yearly beers left to drink 'em, I started to feel myself fall into a familiar mindset: It's Christmas Eve, and this feels impossible. For a little bit, I felt like maybe I would suicidally throw out the entire This Is My Blood plan, say fuck it, drink as many beers as I could over the next week, let the ancient anxieties of the Eve get to me once again, and let beer plaster over the hurt and confusion once more. I almost let it happen. Seriously.

 

But then I cracked a beer, and immediately felt nauseous. I don't know if it was a random spot of cheese or if the gods of alcoholism were sending me a message, but I understood. I can't give up. Christmas Eve will never be perfect. Whether it's shyness or it's alcoholism or it's genes or it's whatever, I gotta stop using beer as a fix-all. I thought I learned that this year. Lend it to Christmas Eve to test me once again.

 

Anyways, I think that's it. Enough of the Ghost of Christmas Past. Let us move onto the Ghosts of Christmas Present and Future. Happy Holidays, y'all.

NOTES (Beer #1)

BEER: 2° Below

STYLE: English Strong Bitter

ABV: 6.6%

BREWED BY: New Belgium Brewing Company

LOCATION: Fort Collins, CO

PURCHASED AT: Krewstown Beer as part of a "wintery" mix pack, which we brought to my parents' house in lieu of an appetizer

PAIRED WITH: cheese and crackers

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5—I was surprised how much I enjoyed this one, but it had the perfect mix of biscuity malt and light floral fruitiness. I might even go as far as to say that this is the "winter beer" I've had so far that I would recommend under any holiday circumstance (besides, ya know, trying to ignore family problems I guess).

 

 

NOTES (Beer #2)

BEER: Voodoo Ranger

STYLE: American IPA

ABV: 7.0%

BREWED BY: New Belgium Brewing Company

LOCATION: Fort Collins, CO

PURCHASED AT: see above

PAIRED WITH: shrimp, ziti, pierogis—traditionally, I avoid the baked ham

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5—Pretty typical IPA, had the same floral notes that 2° Below had, but obviously in a completely different context. A good level of bitterness, paired well with dinner. Drinkable, as far as IPAs go.

 

BEER COUNT: 540 (three beers total—there were these two, plus half of a Fat Tire Amber Ale, which I had planned on drinking entirely but ended up splitting with Pam because I didn't think it tasted that good, and plus we were trying to get out of there ASAP, and then half of the last Bloodhound Brown Ale, which still tasted great but I was too nauseous to finish (see above))