Features
Eggnog and Estrogen: Christmas with a house of women
By Lo Sniderman ’19
December 8, 2016
Tags features
After a night of twisting and turning over the strange, deep-seated excitement that comes every Christmas Eve no matter how old I am, I’ve finally slipped into a slumber. A slumber so deep that, when a sharp pang in my stomach shoots my eyes open, I wake to the sound of my own shrill screaming. Luckily, it’s not an intruder intent on impaling me on Christmas morning, but my youngest sister Paige using my sleeping body as a trampoline and expecting me to immediately join in her excitement, because, well, “It’s Chriiiiiisssstmaasss!”
The fact that it’s 4:45 a.m. is of no concern to her. Shocked by the murderous scream that has served as my family’s alarm clock, my mom and teenage sister Lilah barge into the room to find me lying helplessly under a bouncing child and a facial expression that says: “I’ve recently faced my own death.” Lilah starts laughing hysterically, and my already annoyed mom tries to shoo Paige quietly back to bed, which naturally is when the first of the day’s waterworks begin. As the tension in the room heightens, we realize that almost all of us are already awake, and pumpkin pie for breakfast at 5:00 a.m. sounds pretty appealing. The key word there is almost. We still have the day’s most daunting and terrifying task ahead of us: waking the wild beast that is my older sister Aseema.
Our first method is to send Paige into her room as bait; she’s just too cute for Aseema to hit her with the slew of obscenities that she usually releases in the early morning. Paige crawls into bed and snuggles up with her, pleading for her to wake up and to begin the Christmas festivities. Today, however, it’s just too early. She’s out cold. Next, I take a stab at it and use the longest object that I can find (which happens to be a broomstick from downstairs) to tap her a few times on the back. All of a sudden, there’s a sharp turn of her body and bam! Direct eye contact with the rabid animal. For the second time today—remember, it’s only about 5:15 a.m. at this point—I see my life flash before my eyes. In the nick of time, my mom swoops in to save the day with a pot of coffee and the pumpkin pie whose smell Aseema can’t possibly turn down. We all pile onto her bed and proceed to eat the pumpkin pie straight out of the pie tin. We laugh, and we’re happy. It’s Christmas morning in my family’s home full of women.
Stomachs full of sugar and coffee, my sisters and I race down the stairs, pushing and shoving until one of us (usually Lilah) ends up hurting herself pretty severely. Crying, yelling for an ice pack, and we’re back in action. The Christmas tree looks beautiful—decorated with a heinous assemblage of clashing tinsel and ornaments that look something like an arts and crafts project by a preschooler.
First comes the unveiling of this year’s strange stocking stuffer items. In mine is a box of Lactaid and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, a craft kit to make Hanukkah-themed paper bag hand puppets and a sketchy bag of fish-shaped chocolates with the nutrition facts written in Swedish. I watch my mom grin unabashedly as Lilah pulls a live salamander—a live salamander—out of her stocking and screeches with disgust. This is, as you might imagine, one of my mom’s true joys in life.
Next comes the unwrapping of gifts. As Lilah, Aseema and I begin to collect our modest pile of presents, Paige is diving head first into a pool of roughly 3,000 shiny packages. Lilah and I start to complain, but the hellish, don’t-you-even-f***ing-start look from our mom immediately silences us. We each take turns, watching with anticipation to see what treats Santa decided to bring this year, and I can sense the jealousy teeming between my two younger sisters. Naturally, I ease the mood with the Justin Bieber Christmas album and proceed to sing every word to “Mistletoe” as the rest of the room forces smiles. My family has endured my Christmas caroling for the past month and a half. At some point, my mom and her boyfriend give each other strangely sexual looks as they exchange cat ears and body lotion as gifts. My sisters and I are visibly horrified.
During the gift-unwrapping process, someone is bound to start crying. Whether it’s because Aseema got the coat that I wanted and I’m overly emotional because of the morning’s traumatic events, or because my mom is overwhelmed with how much she loves all of us, tears will fall. Aseema, our designated keeper of zen (after she’s wide awake, that is), cheerily keeps the gift process moving until the room is an absolute disaster of paper and bows and emotions.
At this point it’s about 10:00 a.m. and our inevitable exhaustion has set in. It tames the hormones in the room that have, at this point, scared my mom’s boyfriend out of the house—his excuse? A grocery trip for eggnog of all things. So, we gather all the blankets we can find and cuddle up on the couch for A Christmas Story. Aseema’s asleep again in 10 minutes, Paige and I are cuddling, Lilah is picking the perfect Christmas morning picture to post on instagram, my mom is taking long, deep breaths. There’s finally joy in the world.