It wouldn’t really be Christmas without my sister, Roni, her husband, Matt, and their dogs, Sprocket and Gadget. In fact, one year they even came out to China to celebrate the season with us. That was the year I had a brain freeze, and gave Matt a bamboo keyboard because he’s a computer engineer, and it seemed sort of Chinesey and computery. Naturally he was a very gracious recipient of my weirdness, and I have hopes that he can pass it on as a white elephant, or possibly use it to prop an unsteady table. This year he came up with a bamboo keyboard of his own.

On Christmas Eve afternoon, I was standing in their living room when Matt took me aside. “I got Roni a fish, so we need to keep her stocking upright.”

I’m not sure what my face did, but my brain raised an eyebrow. A live fish? In a stocking? With candy and other nonaquatic accoutrements?

“Okay,” I said, silently calculating the number of hours before the stocking might be emptied, and hoping with all my heart that my very tender-hearted sister would not spend Christmas morning watching a dead blue beta fish slide out over her soaking fun-size candy bars and goldfish crackers. I trusted Matt though, because he’s a thorough sort of person who would have asked the pet store clerk an appropriate number of questions concerning the life expectancy of a lone beta fish in a disposable plastic container, assuming, of course, the lid remained in place. That right there was both the fly and the ointment, because to me there seemed to be a lot riding on a cheap plastic lid mass produced for a semi-squishy container that was never designed to last until it would be dug up by archeologists and studied as the key to our cultural and religious beliefs.

I made a mental note to take custody of said stocking as soon as possible, and because I am such a good sister, I then went back to my five-mile To Do List and forgot all about it. A few hours later Matt and Roni arrived at our house, dropped their gear in the guest bedroom, including stockings, which got laid flat on the bed. Apparently, Matt had a long, distracting To Do List as well, and to be fair, we were all excited to start the festivities.

Our Christmas Eve celebration might not have looked like a party to the untrained eye. We all had a casual dinner, some gaming, then my daughter, Abby, looked at Sprocket the Yorkie, and decided he could not go one more minute without getting his eyebrows done. And once she cut a hair or two, she and Roni could not be content until they had cut them all, clipping the dog and laughing like two kids playing Beauty Parlor. About the time both Sprocket and puppy Gadget had been beautified all they could stand, Matt and my boys, Chase and Porter, began to filter upstairs where Porter began holding forth on his latest pet peeve: The Evils of Circumcision.

At about 2:00 pm four days earlier Chase had received a text from Porter, “Dude circumcision is so messed uppp. I’m fuming right now!!” This appeared a tad out of the blue to Chase, but over a series of communiqués it crumbled out that Porter had stumbled onto a series of internet sites proclaiming the serious dangers of circumcision to boys too mini to defend their bits and pieces against doctors looking to augment their salaries by collecting foreskins and selling them to makeup companies.

“All I’m saying is that if we were made in the image of God, why would we want to cut off a piece?”

On Christmas Eve, he could only be knocked off his soapbox by Chase’s accusation that Porter had a whole bottle of chewable vitamins on his desk, which had apparently been a topic of debate for a couple of days at least.

“They’re not chewable!”

“They are chewable!”

It was really all about the dare, and Chase chewed one, just to prove his point. “Tastes like strawberries,” he insisted. “Really, it’s like taking a bite of a real strawberry.” There was a suspicious set to his jaw and a ready hand with the water, but he went on and on, never breaking character. Porter knew, but he had to try it anyway, much like the time when they were little, and the boys put their heads together and decided Porter should hang off the top bunk while Chase hit his fingers until he fell. Sadly, they had not thought to push the train table out of the way, and Porter still has a scar on his head where the hair will not grow. However, he did manage to crunch through that chalky horse pill of a vitamin.

[Sigh] Never underestimate the stupidity of brothers in groups of two.