I have to acknowledge what's going on with my peers. D has declared her independence from family holidays; J is actually seeking snow (her husband is from one of the frozen parts of the world).

I'm not sure I'm ready to follow D into the brave new world of the non-family holiday. My family's Christmas is not necessarily tasteful but it is definately self-indulgent. Our holiday remains multigenerational and largely alcohol-free, but at the same time slighly scandalous and wildly unpredictable.

I'm happy to spend a tasteful and self-indulgent evening with D, where everything is tight, tony, and under control.

But imagine a context in which I am quiet one. Both sides of my family are made of ham. Different flavors of ham, but ham nonetheless.

The funny part was that this year, in San Francisco, we spent Christmas Eve with the A family in San Jose, my uncle's family. In the car ride, my cousins warned H and me about their conservative, colonized cousins who married white guys to apologize. They've made progress in their identity crisis now that they have kids who are even less culturally brown than they are.

Anyway, we arrived in the A family house in San Jose, and there was no yelling. Little kids were well dressed and behaved. Dinner buffet was on the dinner table (getting cold) and dessert buffet was on the island in the kitchen. In the living room was a bland artificial tree, presents carpeting the ground around it from wall to wall. The coffee table had been pushed to the side, making more space for present-opening and rendering the piano out of reach and unplayable. It was probably just cosmetic, anyway.

In the kitchen, uncle R and his older brothers were holding court, offending cousin J by asking him when he was going to perpetuate the A family name. They asked him if he liked girls. J was p.o.ed. I tried to rescue him, but I couldn't find a way to get them off of cousin J without being bastos.

Below the uncles of the oval table, in the family room, was where the karaoke was set up. Needless to say, most of my ham family's time was spent there. I was still recovering from strep, but I ended up singing to kill time. I got sick of their kareoke shyness, so I just programmed the damn thing with a bunch of songs, and then people sang.

It's like slicing an apple. People don't think they want apple, because they imagine eating a whole apple. So if you say, Do you want an apple? people always decline. But slice an apple and put it on the plate in front of them, and they will eat as many apples as you can slice.

Some funny notes about the A family party: they had a White Elephant gift exchange, which was very orderly; there was little screaming or laughter. Of course, I wasn't there, I was at karaoke, but I'm pretty sure there was no laughing so hard that you see spots. The problem is two-fold: 1) everybody had real gifts under the tree (except for us) and 2) the White Elephant gifts had a $20 minimum as a constraint. They should have just called it the lame elephant gift exchange.

My mama was impressed by how civilized the whole affair was. The rest of us were slightly dismayed.

After a while, we drove back up to Daly City and tsismised until bed time. On Christmas Day, uncle J came over with his young, well dressed kids. At that point, though, my mama and her sisters were already wearing antlers and singing tunes from the early 60s. Our Brown Elephant gift exchange had a $3 ceiling, and it was a damn shame the tape wasn't running. The funniest gifts were stolen from the kitchen: agar-agar, a hand full of ginger, a pomelo, a phallic eggplant. Also, the Brown Elephant likes to give you things you already own, so uncle R got his own sweater, cowsin J got his own book. That, my friends, is comedy.

Another comedic event of our Bay Area Christmas was the advent of Bastos Yoda, who made me laugh until I saw spots. Bastos Yoda, was basically Yoda, so with the voice and the grunting and the focus-fronting grammar, but also totally dirty. So weather over-sharing his gay sexploits with other Jedi (you knew!) or asking my sister if he could watch her pee. Bastos Yoda is bastos!

See, both sides of my family are a scream. I don't seek independence from them over the holidays. I have independence from them the rest of the year.

I do have two complaints about California, though. One, I was COLD there! I had my coat on the entire time. Auntie R looked at us like we were crazy, but we was cold. The other thing about California is that water heaters there must go 50 degrees hotter than they do in Washington, because I burnt my damn hand every day trying to wash my hands with hot water. Just today I turned on the hot water in my own bathroom and gave thanks for our safe, practical, energy-saving temperature limit in Washington. Who cares if our clothes aren't as white.

Abrupt change of subject.

I hate snow. I hated the cold of it, the wet of it. In Michigan it fell in December and stayed there until March. It was disgusting. When it wasn't a disgusting, salty, slushy mess, it was a trecherous sheet of ice on the sidewalk between my door and my work.

Rain, I can handle. But snow? I don't want to see it, much less play in it. I remember playing in snow when I was a kid, and then getting it in my socks or up my sleeves, and then going inside, changing my clothes, and turning on the tv.

In the Pacific Northwest, it snows once a year. The city shuts down, we have a day or two off of work, and then it melts away. Perfect. Idiot midwesterners complain bittertly about how the city should invest millions of dollars in snowplows so that they don't miss a day of work. They are easily identified and then mentally marked for future ignoring. They will be the ones in crises during an earthquake as well; everybody gets to hear about how this kind of stuff never happens back in Ohio.

I just remembered I have a turkey breast defrosting. Happy New Year, everyone.