I am alone in my parents' house, evidently stranded in the wake of Christmas Eve Morning church attendance. I have a vague memory of being prodded awake by my mother at 8:30, but not being able to form sentences to explain why I couldn't lift my head from the pillow. The cold medicine I drank last night after our Christmas Eve Eve get together (the first in a string of four increasingly elaborate parties with my family) was so potent I succumbed nearly instantly and floated in a half-asleep daze for the next twelve hours, 'til now. I still can't keep my eyes open, though a tepid cup of coffee is bravely doing my part to lift the fog.

I got in to town last night after a solid week of adrenaline-fueled sleeplessness and outright, giddy exhaustion. We had double Christmas programs this week, and class parties, and potlucks every day and I had my first houseguest since J and I moved in two years ago even though I'm still in the middle of the World's Slowest Cleaning Project EVAR, and, and, and...

And so by the time I got to my parents' I was pretty much drained, and no amount of grande latte with nutmeg in the foam was going to cut it. I was just dog tired, boss.

When I get tired I have a tendency to be a bit more honest with my thoughts and feelings than usual. It's pretty much like being drunk, especially because I also tend to bump into low-lying objects and feel a burning, fundamental desire to belt out every Mariah or Celine or Whitney or Chaka or Melissa ballad that has ever been sung on American Idol because at that moment I just know exactly what they mean in that 7th-grade-girl-writing-in-my-Lisa-Frank-diary-with-the-brass-lock-with-my-glitter-pen-about-WHO-I-LUV-4F4-and-then-spraying-the-page-with-some-Exclamation-perfume-because-that-seals-it way and if I sing them to you, right up in your face, I just KNOW you'll know too, y'know?

Fortunately, since last night was a family dinner, there were no such recordings in the house of my 90 year old great aunt, so I was left with just a poor sense of balance and an especially candid tongue...a deadly combination in its own right. And I think I might've implored my family to stop being so sarcastic and mean to one another, and I think I might've used the phrase "it's Christmas, goddamnit" and I think I might've also open hand-slapped my brother on the shoulder and fell backwards against our van, laughing, when they all started snickering at me for demanding that everyone be nice on Christmas.

This all might've happened, but I can't remember because I drank cough syrup and fell asleep on the couch watching the Oxygen channel. And now I am in my parents' house alone on Christmas Eve, and they're either at church or have been raptured and so I can't work to instill the spirit of Christmas compassion and kindness into them for the remaining days of 2006. Because as I am reading about all the people who believe in the power of Christmas to bring each of us together, I have to tell you that the one thing in which I truly have rock solid faith is humanity's ability to be kind even when we don't want to be. That it's in everyone, but that sometimes it's too difficult to maintain because the rest of the world is just so nasty and mean and it's easy to succumb to all that. I've noticed it especially in my family, where every act of kindness is tempered with some sort of "don't want to get too close to the world" sarcasm or aloofness in the end. So I'm going to keep asking them to just stop with the pretense, to just be nice, to accept Christmas gifts with a thank you and not a comment about what they don't like, to enjoy family members for what they are and not worry about how annoying they can be. To just finally relax and understand that it is okay to be happy. That it's never okay to be hateful. This is my one Christmas wish and I feel very strongly about it, drunk or no.

I guess, though, if they're really Raptured and gone, they wouldn't mind me drinking some more cough syrup and cranking up a little X-tina on the stereo.