You can't choose your family, but can choose whether or not to spend Christmas with them.

I just found out informally, in passing, through the wife of a cousin, that my extended-extended family is having a big get together on Christmas day.

I sent a subtle email to the uncle hosting the event, expressing disappointment at not receiving an official invite.

(Subtle is when you throw a brick through someone's living room window, right?)

Anyway.

He pleaded “slackassedness”.

We could have made it to the gathering, but decided to instead stick to our original plans (finalised only a fortnight ago) of having my parents and brothers and D-Missus' parents and brother over to our house.

Apparently the absent invite might be linked with an ongoing feud that I was previously unaware of:

Twenty years ago, my favourite uncle turned up to live with us out in the country, because he had a couple of nervous breakdowns. Or something.

A few years later he had just moved out into his own house, just around the back of the valley from us, when he started hearing noises at night. People talking.

The area is known for its cannabis growing. The voices he was hearing at night might not have been imagined...

But then he started believing that he was mowing people down with his truck every time he went out driving.

The area is not known for its pedestrians.

Not long after, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic.

To make matters worse, it turned out that the decrepit house, sold to him by a religious cult, had previously been used to store volatile chemicals.
It had never been decontaminated.

The “feud” started when the rest of my father’s siblings had a meeting to decide what to do about my uncle. A decision, that, for some unknown reason, they did not involve my parents in. The very people who probably knew him and his mental state better than anyone…

So, it’s a pretty lame-ass feud.
It consists of my parents being pissed off about something very historic. But my mother knows how to keep a grudge. She is a redhead, after all.

But it also puts a fresh light on why they don’t always get invited to family gatherings.

Anyway. The role of planning such future gatherings is now to be taken out of their hands. The next generation has usurped that right. My generation. The first cousins. First cousins with blood like brothers…

And everyone will be invited.

So there.

My small home town only has a dozen people officially classified as mentally ill.

My uncle is one of them.

He met another one of that 12 while visiting his doctor, struck up a relationship and got married. And they seem very happy with their mad, crazy love.

I expect one day they will kill us all at a family gathering…

Yes, that was a bad joke.

He’s still my favourite uncle.

I do wonder sometimes about my father’s sanity as well though.

He’s the one who gave away his rifle to his crazy brother, when he sold the farm…

The total population of my small home town is 12 people…

My father’s sister married my mother’s brother.

And my father’s other sister married a cousin.

And my two grandmothers were also related somewhere along the line.

And someone married a goat.

We’re not hillbillies, really.

I told a guy at work today that I found his resting of smelly sock-clad feet on the meeting room table quite offensive to my culture.

“What culture? You're a fucking redneck! What could you possibly find culturally insensitive?”

“My people also don't like it when you insult their banjo playing…”

The government-funded group responsible for monitoring children’s health and development reckons Baby Ginge is underweight for her age.

They said the same thing about D-Girl at the same age.
She’s fine.

What these fucking people don’t understand is that my family name roughly translates from Viking as “You can eat and drink whatever you damn well like and not put on weight, because you have a superhuman metabolism”.

That translation neglects to mention anything about the “until you hit 25 and then your fat ass might have to lay off the Guinness and donuts and pasta and secret midnight breakfasts and go hit a treadmill…”

D-Girl got her first-ever bee sting tonight.

Awww, how cute.

She was pretty shaken up. I wanted to make her understand that the bee did not mean to hurt her, it was just trying to tell her that she was crushing it.

Me: “Bees are our friends. Where does honey come from?”

Her: “The shops.”

And thus ended the lesson.
She’s way too smart for me.