I recently got married. This holiday season was the first time I’ve had the opportunity to experience a Christmas with the new in-laws. I’m well liked by Holly’s family (mostly because of my awesomeness) so I wasn’t really nervous. That said, it was certainly very different from my usual Christmas, and that brings a certain degree of apprehensiveness.
Last year I sat in my house with my friend Danny and got drunk. Just the two of us. We watched Elf and Home Alone and Dan fell asleep at 3pm. When you’re in a foreign country over the holidays, Christmas day just turns into a day off work where you can start drinking early and eat more chocolate than usual.
The year before was in Scotland. Christmas day with my parents is spent on the couch. It’s the one day of the year that my dad cooks for my mum, and the day is run with a kind of military precision. My father doesn’t really see the point of cooking without a clearly laid out plan and a very specific recipe and timing for each part of the meal, so we’re able to have a timetable as to how the day is going to go - we can usually work it around the television schedule. Most of the time we don’t really move unless we absolutely have to. I end up doing the dishes. It’s a day for just the three of us.
When Christmas rolled around this year and I faced the prospect of hanging out with so many of Holly’s family all at once, I just wanted the evening to pass by without much in the way of incident. I decided not to drink too much, I would eat, I would make jokes every now and again, and I would provide Christmas hugs when prompted. I would entertain the kids when they weren’t entertaining each other, and the festivities would be wrapped up by 10.30. Easy.
All of this went as planned, apart from the part where I electrocuted myself.
Now, believe me when I say this - there isn’t much you can do when you electrocute yourself in front of your new wife and all of her extended family (four generations worth of people, folks). I made the mistake of touching the metal outer part of a coffee urn which wasn’t grounded. My brother-in-law, Jeremy, had asked me to check if the coffee was hot. It wasn’t. I was half-sitting on a couch when it happened, and I rather quickly found myself in a more lying-down-ish position. After the initial shock, there was a wave of concern from Holly’s Aunts (there was a few nurses in attendance), but once it was clear that I was okay, the jokes began.
“Dude, when I said that we should get buzzed tonight, that wasn’t quite what I meant.”
“Jon, I know that spending time with our family can be pretty shocking, but you’re taking it to the extreme!”
The kids started picking up random objects and shuddering before falling to the floor in convulsive laughter. As electrocutions go, it was still relatively minor - there was no scarring or burning and the main side effect was a headache that hung around for a couple of hours - but I’m going to forever be known as the guy who got electrocuted at Christmas that one time. The story will follow me around. I’ll be fifty and Jeremy will be telling my kids about the time I got a shock from a broken coffee urn. Then I’ll tell his kids that it was ALL THEIR DAD’S FAULT. I guess this is how families work.
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