Hallelujah Can Bite Me

SO it’s over. The months of planning, the decorating and spending. The tireless hours of wrapping and smiling and cooking all over in a flash and a fervor of ripping paper flying about. Shouts of "Awesome!" and "It's just what I wanted!" and "Mama look!" and then it’s over.

The living room resembling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and my bank account similar to the FEMA funds.

The family niceties are over and through, although in my Griswoldesque life, this wasn't the case. No, nary a year goes by where an argument of monumental proportions doesn't arise between someone in my immediate family. Although, this used to be tradition of my father and I, seeing as in high school or soon after I was kicked out of the house theoretically 2 Christmas Eve's in a row...but you get the idea.

NO this year's Asshole Award clearly went to my brother for sheer instigational purposes. The pompous ass.

Now mind you, my brother is "that guy" The one who has to have the last word, has to be right in every situation, even when you clearly know he'd wrong. He is a perpetual button pusher. He will find the tiniest thing that will get you going in the slightest and just harp on it until you are ready to dive across a table and throttle him. Ahh family.

So, in the month or so leading up until Christmas, my brother in all of his pompousness needed to remind his single mother sister, his sister with her rent, her car payment, with bills and debt up the wazoo, that he had gotten her a grill for her 30th birthday. Yes. A gift I appreciated. However, he negated to remind the world he had also not gotten her a gift in say the 3 or so years prior to this birthday so he now looks like a hero. He also got the grill on a ridiculous sale, otherwise he never would have bought it.

And that obviously the moral of gift giving, the "reason for the season" is not about one-upping, no. It's about the joy you can bring your loved ones. Blah, blah, blah.

So, I go back to the month leading up. He goes on and on about his stellar gift giving skills. About how much I now "owe" him a great gift since I didn't get him a birthday gift. (clearly forgetting the almost $80 dinner I took him and my mother out to for his birthday but clearly food doesn't)

Now remember, my brother lives at home. Has never paid rent in his life. Lives off of his unemployment checks and the random side work he can get from time to time and spends most of his free time smoking pot and drinking beer.

Now, after bitching and moaning for a month about what he wanted for Christmas, this specific part thing for his truck. One in which I went to 7 different stores to find, and couldn't and finally had to special order and have overnighted so he had something to open on Christmas morning, since the mere mentioning of waiting until my next paycheck to get it for him sent him on yet another rant so I essentially put my account in near negative status to shut him up and ordered it anyway, being the loving and thoughtful, selfless sister that I am. (ok and partly to shut him up)

The asshole gets me a $25 gift card to a gas station....that I don't even go to. Along with a condescending note to not let my car go below a 1/4 of a tank.

Now granted, during a by-week of paycheck on my way to a gas station a couple weeks back I ran out of gas in the cold, but that doesn't allow for the whole asshole gag-Christmas gift in front of my family to be presented and after I drove around the state of Massachusetts to shut him the hell up and make sure he got exactly what he wanted.

Schmuck.

So then the aftermath of the holidays, ridiculous attitudes from people you don't need them from, like people who are supposed to be your best friends.

People who then turn around and accuse you of using them as a backup plan, as a fair-weather friend when you left your own family party early to make sure you could go to their family party because you promised you would. Last time I checked, a back-up friend didn't rate a visit on a major holiday, but I perhaps misread the manual.

Then again, I maybe misread the manual on best friends in general, since after 20 years of friendship I seemed to have gotten another one all wrong too, but I digress.

So in an effort to help yet another friend forget her troubles, the day after Christmas we head to my favorite watering hole. Ahh yes. Nothing says post holiday debauchery like a dive bar.

And what a weird night it was. Not only were there several of what I believe to have been cast-offs from Jersey Shore there, one of them apparently decided to fall in love with me (he told me as much) and decided that serenading me by doing Beyonce's Single Ladies dance was clearly the way to my heart. Yeah not so much.

And all this while I was sober, since in all of my motherly responsibility I was the designated driver.

But I decided having a dance battle ala Bring It On with a deaf African American guy was clearly a better alternative for me. So Step It Up I did. Naturally, I was sweating like a fat man in a sauna and I step outside, and run into a guy who somehow knew my father. I was completely dumbfounded.

I went to the Patriots game the next day and got to see them clinch the Division, although walking 986 miles from where we parked gave me a blister on the bottom of my foot the size of Puerto Rico and am now limping like I broke my foot, aside from being in extreme pain because dance battling with a deaf African American while you have a torn disc in your back is not the brightest idea I have ever had.

Needless to say, the end of 2009 has thus far been an interesting one and I can't fricking wait for this year to be over.

I’d chant Handel’s Messiah in my head, but it’s still friggan Christmas music, and Hallelujah can bite me.