HBO documentaries be damned, there’s nothing quite like being a Cape Cod kid. No matter how old I get, I treasure the ability to come home for the holidays and spend some time with my family. Christmas this year wasn’t anything terribly remarkable, and we were sad that sister #4 could not be with us. Still, we had everyone else converging in Mashpee to once again enjoy a bit of Hallinan style Christmas cheer. For me, after being thrown into a new duty station where I’m still trying to find a new social circle, this is exactly the kind of holiday I needed.

Please note: if this is your first go with us, then I’d offer a warning and say that this entry might be somewhat PG rated (but not as bad as in previous years). For the rest of you, I’m happy to have you back. Please enjoy.

Since I never quite got on US time during this trip, I woke up on Christmas morning at 4AM. This left me with free time on my hands, so I decorated sugar cookies and enjoyed a 4 mile run with my early rising brother-in-law. This Christmas in the Commonwealth was unseasonably warm, so I set out in shorts and a t-shirt as we traced Hingham Bay and enjoyed Christmas lights obscured by the foggy humidity.  After that we had a rousing chocolate chip pancake and whiskey breakfast, spent some time getting ready and then hopped into the car for our journey down to the Cape.

Soon enough we were over the bridge and passing through Mashpee via the Big Yellow House and Zachary’s Pub. This route sort of traces my old bus route when I attended Mashpee Middle School, and it’s always interesting to see how much it has changed.  Those of you from Mashpee know what I’m talking about.I really do love this place, and some day I’m going to write a book about the town.

Back in our old John’s Pond neighborhood, we pulled into the driveway at around 10AM. Mom of course had the house looking nice and Christmassy, and we brought in our presents and associated children so that we could commence with festivities. Enjoying a mid-morning snack of fudge, peanut butter cup cookies and perhaps a sugary Millennium Falcon, I hovered around the island table and watched the rest of the family holiday scene slowly pull itself into place.

Like my younger sister who’s stuck working the holiday shift in the Bronx, sister #1 is also a first responder. I know that she isn’t super keen to enjoy her day off while crammed into a house of budding mental patients, but I can tell you that Christmas in Mashpee just isn’t the same if she’s not around. As I walked into the living room to witness the Great Unwrapping, I smiled as I noted that Mom’s nativity scene had once again been appropriately disfigured. You were extra creative this year, Riah.

Christmas is fun at our house because lots of random crap gets balled up and stuck under the tree. It’s like a live action human experiment, and you never know what lies beneath the festive wrapping paper. As for me, you might remember that movers showed up to my London flat last week. As such, I found myself unboxing forgotten items like a toiletry kit from a Nouakchott hotel, as well as various airline travel pouches. I hold on to this stuff because I like to wrap it up with tags that say, “To Kevin From Haile Selassie”, and then watch as he unwraps a sleep mask with the Ethiopian Airlines logo emblazoned on it. Christmas, after all, should be educational.

It’s not Christmas if a few things don’t happen while gathered round the tree. First off, everybody’s got to get a flashlight from my dad. Accordingly I now have dozens of flashlights that offer varying degrees of cornea-burning brightness. This year, we got silver ones with ends that fit in your car’s cigarette lighter as a convenient way to charge it (I don’t actually own a car…but then again, I’m the one who wrapped up airplane socks this year, so I can hardly gripe). My dad is big on safety, and in 2015 he also outfitted the lot of us with orange hats to wear while out on the highway and changing a flat tire. They will protect us from The Dark Side.

 As my three year old nephew quickly noticed, we’re kind of equal opportunity around here. Here he is pitting the dancing rabbi against the dancing Christmas tree.

For the five adult kids, we find it far easier on our short-attention spans to just do a Secret Santa exchange. This year, I had a pizza box handed to me, which I found very exciting. Whenever I come home, I always make it a point to stop by Papa Gino’s– so this kind of gift was going to be right up my alley.

And then we get back to more Secret Santa gifts. You know, the useful ones.

And then there were the flavorful gifts:

You’ve gotta hand it to Sister #2. She passed with flying colors while shopping for her Secret Santa person. At some stage in the unwrapping frenzy, we got a call from Molly in the Bronx and we passed the phone around to say hello. We missed her but knew she was making us and FDNY proud.

As things started to wind down and we looked ahead to the Christmas meal, we did a final scan of the living room floor’s disaster zone. There looked to be only a couple of gifts remaining, and one included a box that had come in special from Europe.

This last one was for my other brother-in-law. Picking up the package, he promptly took his ribbon and placed it in a fairly appropriate spot while his lovely wife looked on with those lifelike ear muffs wrapped around her neck. Norman Rockwell, eat your heart out.

Nothing says, “best Christmas ever” like a leg lamp or a bottle of wine that comes in a coffin presentation box. Only available in Europe, I managed to special order this Slayer wine before I flew home for the holidays. Because it took me so long to get a permanent address in London, I  had it delivered to a friend’s workplace…who works a cancer drug company. When the box finally showed up, she texted me saying, “Your coffin has arrived.” Yesss.

Christmas this year was awesome. The food was awesome, the gifts were awesome, and as usual, my family was wicked awesome. It’s funny, I don’t often revisit my archive of blog entries to reread the stuff that I write, but on the odd occasion I do go back and take another look at the holiday entries. I find that I write these more for us than for any external audience who might judge us as outrageous.

I also write these entries for when I’m away from home and feeling a bit lost in the more conventional social constructs of society. You know, the ones that might frown at X-rated chocolate pops and editions of The Portable Atheist that are given out as Christmas gifts. No matter who you count as your family, it’s always comforting to remember that your particular tribe of cohorts is never as far away as you think.