Free The Night Before the Christmas Before I Was Married & Other Festive Tales by Adam Maxwell Page B

Christmas you arsehole.”

Blood In The Snow
    S o I told you about last Christmas, yeah?  How I wound up beating the living shit out of Santa?  Not the real Santa, of course, it was the father of my ex-girlfriend dressed up.  Ah well, it was the night before the Christmas before I was married.  It all worked out in the end I suppose because now I’m happily married and thankfully not to my ex-girlfriend.  

    The thing about marriage is that it requires a bit of give and take so this year was going to be have to be different.  This year it wasn’t going to be the easy by-the-numbers of accidentally becoming engaged to a loony tunes ex-girlfriend and beating the crap out of Santa all the while relying on my brother to help extricate me from said predicament.  This year the big guns were out.  This year we weren’t visiting my family.  We were visiting my wife Sonia’s family.

    Hang on, that deserves capital letters.  MY WIFE’S FAMILY.

    WHAT A BUNCH OF LOON BAGS.  Sorry.  I mean what a bunch of interesting people whose take on life is slightly different to my own.  And my wife’s.  And pretty much anyone else I had ever met who walked upright.

    There were others but, for the purposes of this discourse I will limit myself to the relevant players.  Perhaps I can bend you ear another time on the complexities of the twin Aunts Nadia and Maria…

    Firstly there was her little cousin Jeff whose dual fixation with his female relatives’ breasts and the cartoon PowerFormers seemed equally disturbing and interchangeable.  And secondly there was her father.  He was a man who seemed to be one hundred and fifty years old, the last seventy of which he had spent in a chair by the fire apparently due to the fact that his skeleton had been removed.  He liked to have Terry’s Chocolate Orange melted down and would drink it through a straw until it solidified then throw the mug with all his might at whoever was closest to him whilst screaming the words “Why Gertrude? Why?”

    Needless to say I found this out the hard way.  Someone, possibly my wife who had retreated into drunkenness a full half hour after arriving home, had slopped the stuff on the floor.  I only realised this when I felt the warm goo seeping through my sock and solidifying on the cold sole of foot.  I may have had the chance to dwell on this had it not been for the glancing blow the side of my head received courtesy of the father in law.  My wife blew a sort of raspberry laugh at the scene but showed no signs of entertaining sobriety any time soon.

    Breakfast was accompanied with a nip of sherry.

    Mid-morning snack and pre-lunch was mulled wine.

    Lunch time - a bottle of red wine.

    Evening time spirits were raised by raising glass after glass of spirits.

    Need I say more?

    It was, it has to be said, a drunkenness that I sympathised with but not one I could dive into.  It was one thing to inflict yourself on your own family who would forgive you no matter what.  It was another entirely to be howling the words AND ANOTHER THING whilst stabbing a dipsomaniacal digit at anyone you weren’t related to.

    Which was why I was so disappointed when, on Christmas Eve after forty eight hours of virtual success things took a turn for the worse.

    Papa – for that was what he insisted I call him in spite of the fact that everyone else called him Dad – got to congealing point with his Chocolate Orange and was preparing to hurl the thing across the room.  Now, being sober I’d been watching the proceedings with some interest, noting the stages and waiting for the inevitable to occur.  When he reached the point of no return I reacted, standing up and making a break for the door before some worse injury was inflicted.

    It seemed that my dear wife Sonia had the same idea but my execution was a little more precise than hers.  She rolled off the sofa into my path, I tripped on her prone and giggling form, my right foot shooting forward, trying