Your Awkward Christmas?

Without a doubt, the Christmas season remains my favorite part of the year. But like any other year, there are certain inherently awkward parts of the season that just go hand in hand with the amazing ones. Stuff like...

1.  Awkward Gifting.          
    I walk into my job, and there on the table lay a gift certificate. "Oh, heya Jeff. Boss left that for you." Don't get me wrong here, presents are amazing. Just love the heck outta presents, no matter how thoughtless or silly or small- they're just there. And if they just so happen to be thoughtful or incredibletastic or great, even better!

If not, here's the proper procedure.

But seriously. Am I supposed to give a gift back? If I am, how do I... where do I... what... I mean, let's face it. Getting someone approximately quintiple your age any kind of present is just uncomfortable. Food? Nope. Cosmetics? Definitely not. Gift cards?... hell, that money's better left in the hands of a semi-conscious teenager (me). Really. And WHO gets gifts? In grammar school, some kids got all 19,000 teachers a gift for Christmas; ranging from the impossibly thoughtful to a handful of pens (also thoughftul, since kids never gave pens back after borrowing them), but chances are their parents forced them to write those pathetic, frilly, nicely decorated cards anyway (you know who you are, dastardly fiends). 

 2.    Awkward Relatives.            Luckily, my family has managed to avoid this. We're all close, and unlike every Hispanic family in the history of ever, don't have cousins, nephews, uncles, and aunts numbering in the triple digits all living within half an hour of us.

Each pin represents 10 relatives.

In the end, it's pretty unfeasible getting Uncle Jim a present exceeding the size and value of a pencil. So what I'm saying... is he should expect a pencil. Along with all 80 other uncles.

3. Not Enough Food
 Haha, I'm totally kidding.

4. Cold Weather
There's a point in life when cold weather evolves into a cumbersome, tiring beast. It's that stupid cat of yours that's totally better left outside. And is left outside whenever you can help it. But that point when you grow weary of blisteringly freezing weather, unreasonably enough, without snow, is right about ten minutes after you were born. There's a good reason that Inuits/Eskimos only became good at building igloos while the Aztecs and Mayas were building human-sacrifice pyramids: weather. If you were to bring up isolated tribes that have barely figured out that fire does indeed burn all your fingers, not just most of them, I would walk away casually and disregard you.

This logic you keep speaking of... it's madness!

Luckily, this Christmas season was as fantastic as they come. At one point, my brother in law got me fire starting papers that were wrapped to look like Benjamins and then someone else "accidentally" put wrapping paper over a candle.    It was an exciting Christmas Day.

"I got sand."