Who could dislike Christmas?

Bah, humbug. I have to say, I still don’t like Christmas. This year was basically no different, until at least I heard some particularly good news. But I’ll get to that later.
It is something of a cliché to mention that Christmas holidays mean having to put up with annoying relatives. But the thing about clichés is that they are clichés for some good reason – very often this being that they are true! Certainly, I am not one to disagree. In my particular case, the Holidays seem to be the perfect time to have relatives show how unaware of anything around them they are. For example, the relative (yes, my mother-in-law) who thought it would be nice to teach my two-year-old daughter to say the Lord’s Prayer and get her to recite it at the Christmas table. After all, how could anyone have anything against that? Anyone like her atheist father, for example! My wife and I had a long talk about that afterwards and she seemed to understand where I was generally coming from. Only generally, though. For her, living in a country where almost everyone espouses Catholicism, it is hard to imagine what it feels like a minority. What is worse, a minority within one’s own family. So, it was very good to see my wife cut her mother off the next day when she tried to repeat the performance. Unfortunately, my mother-in-law’s gaffe was not the only one for this holiday period.
At the same time, having my brother around is really great. I find that there is no-one I rather talk to about things that are happening in my life than him. And much the same seems to be true in his case. Given how little of our adult lives we’ve spent in the same time zone, the news he gave us during the Christmas dinner was particularly pleasing. The news was actually given by his girlfriend who, after informing us that they had something to tell us, just showed us the (unusually nice) diamond ring. The rest of the evening I smiled like an idiot. The fiancée is great and I think that the two of them will be able to make it work. The wedding is to be some time next year and is going to be a somewhat odd experience for me, given that it will be something like twenty years (and twenty kilos) ago that I attended my brother’s first (and thus far only) wedding. Although I haven’t talked him about it, I assume that this means that my brother is now thinking of coming to live here permanently. All of which makes for an outcome that no-one could have expected – he’d never been interested in coming back on a permanent basis or in getting married again.