Holiday ramblings. It’s long and occasionally a confused recitation but there are a few humorous stories.
November 19, 2009
Duck! It’s the Holidays.
By JOYCE WADLER
The weather grows cold, the holidays are bearing down upon us and soon we will find ourselves in that seething caldron of unmannerly behavior: the family holiday gathering.
It gets rude in there. Just how rude is exemplified by the story of a teacher from the Midwest who was pregnant with her first child when she attended a large Thanksgiving celebration at the home of her husband’s parents.
For months, the teacher’s mother-in-law had been saying that she wanted to be in the waiting room when the teacher went into labor, and the teacher, who recounted her story on the Mothers-in-Law Anonymous section of Grandparents.com, had been politely rebuffing her.
So at Thanksgiving dinner, with the family gathered around the table, the mother-in-law (referred to on this site as “MIL”) took the matter into her own hands.
“MIL announced to me and the entire family the following,” the teacher wrote. “ ‘I WILL be in the waiting room while DIL is in labor, and all of you are welcome to come too. MY SON will come and give me updates every hour on the hour.’ ”
The teacher told this reporter, “I wanted to scream: ‘Are you serious? I’ve told you that I don’t want anyone there and you invite the entire family! Who do you think you are, taking over my first birthing experience?’ But what could I say and remain tactful?”
Her violent impulse is not uncommon at family holiday gatherings. Indeed, there are those who claim that there exists, in the archives of The Saturday Evening Post, a Norman Rockwell painting that is entitled “Throttling Granny,” in which a New England farmer has one calloused hand on the throat of a gray-haired lady whose grandchildren cheer him on.
Mark Smaller, who heads the public information committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association, said he believes that holidays can provoke “temporary regressions,” in which parents, adult children and siblings, once reunited, revert to decades-old patterns of behavior.
“The worst I’ve heard is when a parent says to an adult child, ‘See, when you come you spoil the whole holiday,’ ” Dr. Smaller said. “These kinds of remarks actually keep me and people like me in business.”
“What I often say to my patients and myself is, ‘This is temporary,’ ” he said. “Though in the midst of it, it is hard to believe you are going to crawl out of it when the holiday ends.”
Clearly, there are many who do not know how to behave when they go home for the holidays — guests, obviously confused by the meaning of “an outing at Grandma’s house,” who choose the occasion to announce to the table that a family member is gay. Or hosts who seat a 19-year-old college student at the children’s table and wonder why he does not return the following year. (Memo to the reader in Washington who is thinking, “That couldn’t be me”: Of course it was you. You couldn’t set up a folding table next to the main table and throw a cloth over it? Shape up!)
For all of them — and the rest of you — an etiquette guide. Names have been changed or omitted in many cases to prevent family relations from degrading any more than they already have.
Carving the Bird Is an Honor to Be Given, Not Yanked
Melissa Pritchard, a designer at William Arthur, a venerable stationery company in West Kennebunk, Me., is too young to recall Thanksgiving in 1965, but the story is part of her family’s holiday lore. It involves a man who was her grandmother’s new husband, someone who, Ms. Pritchard is told, was loud, drunk and liked to pinch his new stepdaughter on her backside. When it came time to carve the turkey, the man — Ms. Pritchard described him in an e-mail message as the “soon-to-be-ex Grandpa” — proclaimed himself the new head of the family and insisted on carving the bird.
“He yanked the electric carving knife from my father, not knowing the turkey was trussed with wires,” Ms. Pritchard said. “As the knife came down full speed onto the wires, my father swears actual sparks were ignited. The force of the impact sent the turkey literally flying down the table, where it landed in Great Grandpa Eddy’s lap.”
“Well into his 80s by then and a man of few words,” she continued, “Great Grandpa looked quietly down at the steaming turkey in his lap and said, ‘Oh, just a little white meat for me.’ ”
Name Calling Is Never Appropriate, Even With Lawyers
Some years ago, a successful New York City designer was delighted when a long-lost cousin got in touch. The cousin was tall, blond and beautiful, and had what the designer calls “a big personality.”
But when the designer and her sister invited the cousin, her husband and their teenage daughter to Thanksgiving dinner, the gathering quickly became strained.
“In a room full of men,” the designer said, her cousin announced that “her 19-year-old daughter was a virgin and she thought it was about time she lost her virginity.”
“One of the male guests cracked, obscenely: ‘So should we all get in line?’ ” she said. “That made everyone uncomfortable except my cousin, who seemed to get a charge out of it.”
As dinner continued, the cousin flirted with one of the male guests, putting her hand on his leg, and attacked another when she found out he was a lawyer.
“She implied — actually, she said — he was a whore because he took money,” the designer said. “They started fighting. He had to leave the room for a while. It became so ugly no one could eat dinner. Finally, an elderly woman, who was like a second mother to me, pulled me aside and told me my cousin was crazy and maybe she should leave.”
Awkward. Did she give you any advice about how to handle that? “She said I could say, ‘Maybe it’s a good time for you to leave, because of the traffic.’ So I took the husband aside and that’s what I told him. He took the hint.”
Isn’t Asking a Guest to Leave Rude? Good question. Let’s have an emergency consultation with Dr. Smaller. His verdict: “One has to do something to protect oneself if people are acting in a deregulated or unreasonable way.”
At Awkward Moments, One Can Never Go Wrong With ‘Would Anyone Care for More Potatoes?’
These days, Nancy Cardozo, a Brooklyn writer, is long married with children of her own. But some years ago, when she was a 19-year-old nanny, she was looking after 14-year-old twins during their parents’ absence at Thanksgiving. Ms. Cardozo was to take the twins to dinner at the home of her employers’ friends, whom she did not know.
“Food gets served, plates are passed around,” she said. “There’s a pause. I’m thinking they’re going to say grace or something. The mom takes a long breath and howls, ‘You never loved me!’ ”
Ms. Cardozo was horrified — she thought a fight was going to break out. The woman’s husband clutched his knife and fork as if contemplating murder. But their children just rolled their eyes as if this were an everyday, if ludicrous, event, and started eating. Soon, so did the husband and wife and the guests.
But Secretly Lacing Those Potatoes With Forbidden Food Groups Is Never Right
Memo to Elderly Southern Granny: We’re on to you, lady. Your son-in-law, the New York art director, told us all about how you tried to sneak meat into the vegetables at your Thanksgiving dinner after his teenage daughter became a vegetarian. Bacon fat in the spinach! So rude! You didn’t even feel guilty when the kid resorted to sniffing every veggie that passed before her and finally would have only milk and crackers. Hang your old gray head (for which some blond streaks would do miracles) in shame.
But we do admire your ingenuity at disguising what happened to the turkey while it was thawing on the porch. Slapping stuffing on the outside of the bird was an inspired way to hide the fact that it had been partly eaten by a raccoon. Of course, since your daughter asked about it while she was carving, it didn’t really work.
Potatoes: Evil Destroyers of Families
Several years ago, Eric Marcus, a New York City writer who is now 51, invited his mother to Thanksgiving dinner at his home. There were a number of cookbook writers and professional cooks at the gathering and, if Mr. Marcus may say so, a fantastic selection of food on the long kitchen counter near the dining room.
Mr. Marcus’s mother was the last to make her selection, lingering beside the food while everyone, including Mr. Marcus, was seated.
“I’m waiting to make my toast welcoming everybody,” said Mr. Marcus, who laughed often as he told his story. “I’m saying, ‘Ma, come sit down.’
She’s noodling around the various foods, and she says, ‘What, no sweet potatoes?’ It was a tone of complaint, she announced it to the assembled crowd, and I was not happy. To her, it wasn’t Thanksgiving unless there were sweet potatoes and marshmallows.”
“I thought, nothing will satisfy my mother,” he continued. “I can speak about this with a sense of love — my mother is long dead and I love her — but I wanted to kill her.”
It doesn’t sound so awful. This had to be about something more than sweet potatoes. “Suddenly I’m 12 years old and we are someplace when she says something inappropriate and embarrassing yet again,” Mr. Marcus said. “All her life, she has a habit of saying negative things.”
Go on? “For Christmas, I once gave her a gift to have the living room painted, because her ceiling was peeling,” he said. “She opens the envelope and there’s a sour look on her face. I say, ‘What’s wrong?’ She says, ‘I hoped you’d pay enough for the whole apartment to be painted.’ ”
“When I was 14, I saved my baby-sitting money to buy my mother a cameo brooch,” he said. “She opens the box and she has that sour look. I say, ‘What’s wrong?’ She says, ‘Well, it’s more your taste than mine.’ ”
“It wasn’t just the sweet potatoes,” he added. “It was a lifetime of she always finds a way to be disappointed.”
Oh, to Be Done With This and Have a Shrink’s Perfect Family!
At Dr. Smaller’s Thanksgiving dinner, “I do all the cooking,” he said. “One year, I was cooking the turkey in a very particular way — it was going to be slowly cooking. I came back and the temperature had been raised. I said, ‘Who raised the temperature?’ My mother said she did, because I had the temperature on too low. I said: ‘You know, Mom, the irony here is that you taught me how to cook and to appreciate cooking. You also taught me that a cook’s kitchen is his or her kitchen — and you’re not to interfere with how I cook the turkey.’ ”
“This has become family legend,” he said. “She says, ‘I love to go into the kitchen, but I’m not allowed!’ ”
We’re Nominating Him for the Nobel Peace Prize
We end our lesson in holiday etiquette with a truly uplifting story: the tale of a 44-year-old New York City interior designer and his longtime boyfriend, a successful international lawyer, age 50, who invited the lawyer’s parents to spend the Christmas holidays with them at their Manhattan apartment and their newly renovated upstate New York house.
The relationship between the designer and his partner’s mother had never been good, but he was determined to be of good cheer.
The guests’ rude behavior began early. The parents, who were asked not to bring their new puppy along, brought it. He did what puppies who have not been housebroken usually do. The designer cleaned it up without comment.
When his partner’s mother was an hour and a half late after being asked to be ready to leave the apartment at noon on the day they were driving to the country, to avoid traffic — and then insisted on having lunch — the designer said nothing.
“I was determined to be Mr. Light and Easy, the perfect little son-in-law,” he said.
Arriving at the country house — for which his partner’s mother had not one word of praise, a particularly hurtful thing to a designer — the designer and his partner made just one request: keep the puppy out of the dining room.
“I had ordered a custom rug, but it didn’t come in time for Christmas,” the designer said. “The vendor was kind enough to lend me a rug. I say they are welcome to let the dog go anywhere in the house, just not the dining room, and we close the doors.”
One senses — actually, smells — the ending to the story. “Next morning, I wake up and there is dog poop all over the dining room,” the designer said. “I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t even upset. It was more like, ‘Wow, that’s an amazing piece of information.’ ”
When his partner’s mother woke up, he asked her to clean it up. “She says, ‘Could you just have it cleaned and send me the bill?’ and heads up the stairs. She says it in this tone as if I was inconveniencing her. So here I am, on my hands and knees, scrubbing up dog poop. I still thought, I’m not going to be the cause of a bad time for his family. No big deal, no big deal, all light and good.”
Then came Christmas Eve dinner, at which his partner’s mother started picking on his partner. The designer could not take it: picking on him was one thing, picking on the person he loved was another. He turned to his guest and delivered a short assessment of her character, in words that cannot be printed in this newspaper.
“She started screaming what a terrible decorator I was and other things,” the designer said. “Finally, I say to her, ‘I can’t believe you’re speaking this way to me in my own house.’ She says, ‘Is it your house? Did you pay for it with your own money?’ I said, ‘I did, and you have one hour to get out.’ ”
“I kicked his 80-year-old parents out of my house Christmas Eve,” he said.
How was the rest of the holiday? “It was fabulous,” the designer said. “They left, the rest of his family came up, they were thrilled by this beautiful house; every fireplace was lit, all six of them. It was unfortunate, but we had a terrific Christmas.”
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Daddy, how was I born?
A little boy goes to his father and asks 'Daddy, how was I born?'
The father answers, 'Well, son, I guess one day you will need to find out anyway! Your Mom and I first got together in a chat room on Yahoo. Then I set up a date via e-mail with your Mom and we met at a cyber-cafe. We sneaked into a secluded room, and googled each other. There your mother agreed to a download from my hard drive. As soon as I was ready to upload, we discovered that neither one of us had used a firewall, and since it was too late to hit the delete button, nine months later a little Pop-Up appeared that said:
Scroll down...
'You got Male!
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BEWARE OF THESE NEW COMPUTER VIRUSES!
AIRLINE LUGGAGE VIRUS - You're in Dallas, but your data is in Singapore.
ALZHEIMER'S VIRUS - It makes your computer forget where it put your files.
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER VIRUS v 1.0 - It terminates and stays resident. It'll be back!
BILL CLINTON VIRUS v 1.0 - It has a six inch hard drive and no memory. Freezes entire system due to unresolved memory conflicts.
BOB DOLE (aka Viagra) VIRUS - Makes a new hard drive out of an old floppy.
DISNEY VIRUS - Everything in the computer goes Goofy.
FRENCH VIRUS - garbles some files and then displays a message asking you for help. If you click OK, it just garbles more files and asks for help again. If you click Cancel, it displays the message, "I surrender!" and shuts down your computer. If you click Ignore, it scans your computer for the German and Russian viruses. If the French, Russian, and German viruses find each other, they merge into a single virus that conflicts with the George W. Bush virus, slowing it down.
GEORGE W. BUSH VIRUS v 1.0 - Doesn't do anything, but you can't get rid of it until November.
GEORGE W. BUSH VIRUS v 2.0 - Tells you it's going to eliminate all other viruses from your computer but that it may take a long time. Then it actually does scan your computer and eliminate viruses. It also scans for Programs of Mass Destruction (PMD), which are programs that destroy a lot of files if they are run. PMDs may be caused by a number of other viruses, such as the Saddam Hussein virus. The only problems with the George Bush virus are that it uses up a lot of your computer's resources while it's scanning, it never seems to find any PMDs, and it keeps switching the background color on your computer screen back and forth between yellow and orange.
HILLARY CLINTON VIRUS v 1.0 - Files disappear, only to reappear mysteriously a year later, in another directory.
HILLARY CLINTON VIRUS v 2.0 - sets the "hidden" attribute on all your accounting files and tells you your computer won't run in 2004 or 2008. Many experts believe this virus may become its most dangerous in 2008.
HOWARD STERN VIRUS - One of the dirtiest viruses around. It writes 4 letter words to all of your files just to annoy the operating system. It also installs an X-rated GIF on your hard drive. Very popular.
HURRICANE VIRUS - It blows away all your files, then tells you the government will help you rebuild them.
MAFIA VIRUS - You don't want it, but you're afraid to get rid of it.
MARTHA STEWART VIRUS - Takes all your files, sorts them by category and folds them into cute little doilies to be displayed on your desktop.
MOM VIRUS- Places a phone call to your mother every time you click on an adult website.
MONICA LEWINSKY VIRUS v 1.0 - It sucks the juice out of your system, but only affects laptops. Then, it emails everyone about what it did. This later activates the Independent Counsel virus.
NEWT GINGRICH VIRUS - It repartitions your hard disk into two volumes yet allocates most of the available resources to the 'Right' partition. When attacked by anti-virus software from the 'left' partition, it terminates and restarts to continue its work as a background process.
NIKE VIRUS - Just does it.
O.J. SIMPSON VIRUS v 1.0 - It claims that it did not, could not, and would not delete two of your files and vows to find the virus that did it.
O.J. SIMPSON VIRUS v 2.0 (Often accompanied by the Johnny Cochran Virus.) – You know it's guilty of trashing your system, but you just can't prove it. Every time you try to search for a file, it runs "Pro Golf Tour 2000" instead.
OPRAH WINFREY VIRUS - Your 200MB hard drive suddenly shrinks to 80MB, and then slowly expands back to 200MB.
PAUL REVERE VIRUS - This revolutionary virus does not horse around. It warns you of impending hard disk attack- Once, if by LAN; twice if by C.
POLITICALLY CORRECT VIRUS v 1.0 - Never calls itself a "virus," but instead refers to itself as an "electronic microorganism."
POLITICALLY CORRECT VIRUS v 2.0 - Rephrases the "Abort, Retry, Fail" prompt as "Choice, Retry, Success-Impaired".
PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION VIRUS - Makes your browser stop at every website.
RICHARD NIXON VIRUS - Also known as the "Tricky Dick Virus", you can wipe it out but it always makes a comeback. Popular in China.
RIGHT TO LIVE VIRUS v 1.0 - Won't allow you to delete a file, regardless of how old it is. Prints, “Oh, no, you don't!”, whenever you choose Abort from the "Abort, Retry, Fail" message.
RODNEY DANGERFIELD VIRUS - Gets no respect. Only allows data do be displayed as one-liners.
DAVID DUKE VIRUS - Makes your screen go completely white.
RUSH LIMBAUGH VIRUS v 1.0 - Probably the most dangerous virus we've ever seen. It occupies 50Mb, complains about all the other files, than eats them. It's so stupid you don't take it seriously until it's too late.
TEENAGER VIRUS - Your PC stops every few seconds to ask for money.
TEXAS VIRUS - Makes sure that it's bigger than any other file.
TITANIC VIRUS - Makes your whole computer go down. You get a sinking feeling when your system crashes.
TOBACCO INDUSTRY VIRUS - It contends that there is no reliable scientific evidence that viruses can harm you computer or that it targets adolescent computer users.
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it's short because YOU all wer on holiday !! and eatin turkey !!
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