My Father at Christmastide

He watches The Gilmore Girls. He Tivos The Hills. During the whole of Christmas afternoon he sat contentedly in front of the fire, watching lifetime original movies on his 50 inch TV screen while Tim and I stood nervously nearby, hoping to catch the first snore of his inevitable nap so that we could connect the Xbox and chainsaw some aliens.

He knows no sin greater than to serve salad at the same time as the main course. He has left a trail of bloodied and broken waiters and waitresses behind him in his never ending quest to rid the world of this most heinous of wrongs. Once he flatly refused to eat (or pay for) a large porterhouse steak that was brought to him whilst he was still eating his salad. He insisted, loudly, that the waitress must throw away the steak he had been brought and have another prepared for him to be ready after he had finished his lettuce. And woe be unto him who should suggest that he 'calm down' or that it is 'no big deal.' The road to disinheritance is paved with such blasphemies. At Red Lobster the other night (yes, I know), he turned heads when he almost launched into a scathing rebuke of our Croatian waiter for bringing the salads at the same time as out order of coconut shrimp. Only some fast conversational footwork to get him reminiscing about a particular black bean soup he used to get for lunch twenty years ago saved the evening.

While watching a football game on television, he saw a player who had just barely missed an interception clap his hands once, forcefully, in frustration. Apparently never having seen humans behave, my father insisted that someone explain to him why the player in question would clap about missing an interception. Was he happy? What's wrong with him? It was explained to my father that a clap of the type he witnessed was a common way to vent the feeling of 'almost, damn!' and that people did this all the time, ourselves included.

He refused to accept this. He insisted that he had never seen anyone do that ever and that we must be wrong.

But he works really hard to put together a nice Christmas every year. He puts up a ridiculously tall tree (mostly to satisfy my sister's arboreal penis envy) and is willing, bless his heart, to watch the same insipid films every single year just to soak it all in. And all he asks for in return is at least one gift which contains something black and leather.

Oh yeah, he seems to have some kind of poorly developed leather fetish, as well.