Friday, March 14, 2003

In honor of the Feast

In honor of the Feast of Lots upcoming next week and the associated revelry thereunto appertaining, today’s blog is brought to you by the word CRAPULOUS and is inspired by those whose tutelage has made me the man or men I am today. 

I knew pretty quickly that I was in over my head.  My first xmas with the inlaws - really, my first full-on xmas ever - was when I was a senior in college, and gave me a hint of what was to come: a dining table covered with board games and wine, the decrepit stereo cranking out holiday polkas, and the deck outside the kitchen stacked wide, deep and tall with cases of Yuengling - the undiscovered treasure of Northeast Pennsylvania.  This was S.O.P. for a few years, when I was the only ‘outsider’ to have been incorporated into this rollicking fold. 

Then, one year, Karen showed up with Pat, and he - can ya believe it - liked beer and wine, and liquor too.  The dining table grew more animated and more crowded yet as PJ, Andi and Phil came on board over the fullness of time.  Now we’ve got little cousin Justin too, sucking down 4-ounce “donkey shots” of Maker’s Mark, and PJ’s brother and cousin and his army buddies daring each other into ever greater feats of intoxication, not to mention the prodigious genetic capacity of all the original family members to, as they say, consume.

There is a pattern to these xmas boozefests, established by acclamation and now confirmed by repetition.  When we wake up we start our day with beer.  (All of us stay in the family home - which was cozy for the original unit of two parents and five kids, and is now bursting at the joists with the addition of five spouses, three new kids, and the irrepressible cousin Justin.) After several hours waiting impatiently for night to fall, we transition to include hard liquor as well in our imbibement.  With dinner, wine is enthusiastically poured and drained, but never lasts very long so we go back to the beer (which is usually purchased daily, in minimum orders of three cases). 

By late in the night we’re concentrating on the hard stuff.  I’ve already had to pace myself for a few hours at least.  We’re all talking pretty loud and we’re switching the rules among the board games.  And then we realize we’re out of the good stuff.  The Tullamore Dew, the Chivas, the rum and vodka, even the goddamn bourbon is gone, the dead soldiers shivering transparently on the icy deck. 

But every year ther’e’s a bottle or two of prank liquor.  Someone bought it for a giggle but as the five or seven or twelve of us blearily gaze at each other and the lone bottle left before us, we know the joke’s on us.  A few years ago it was cheap Chilean Pisco (Andi’s from thereabouts) - not so much a brandy as a solvent, presenting a strong argument in favor of her family’s emmigration.  But I’d drink Pisco any day before I went back to the next year’s slection - genuine Irish Potcheen, distilled from a secret blend of sterno and formaldehyde.  It actually eats away at the bottle in which it’s packaged.  It tastes like a bandaid.  An old one.  We finished it anyway.

When the rancid booze is gone, I take my cue to toddle off to a darkened corner.  Others remain behind to drink more beer, harass each other, and grin their faces into shatters.  I can’t keep up with them, though I’d love to.  They’d wipe the floor with me.  I’ll have more serious drinking to do when I wake up anyway.  Discretion is the better part of valor.  And of not hurling.