by Trey Nosrac

Every year, Aunt Sarah and Uncle Mike host our Christmas party. The festivities begin at noon on Christmas day. To be precise, Aunt Sarah will host. Mike, a quiet, roundish, retired ophthalmological surgeon, is simply an innocent bystander.

Aunt Sarah is my favorite person in the world. In her 50s, tall and straight, with her endless supply of loose dresses, jangling bracelets, and headbands trying to control her greying long hair, she looks like a gracefully aging hippie. My Aunt was born with the happiness/enthusiasm gene. She plunges into something new each year: oil painting, meditation, yoga, jogging, pickleball, birdwatching, tennis, poetry, etc. But as sure and as soon as the seasons change, usually shortly after Christmas, Sarah will find a replacement passion.

Six years ago, she joined me in buying a yearling. Sarah was a great partner, enthusiastic and curious. Her good vibes might have transferred to the yearling, a filly we renamed Good Vibrations. The filly was one of the rarely profitable horses in my checkered ownership past.

Alas, money does not drive Sarah; new pastures beckoned. Sarah turned her enthusiasm to fly fishing.

Sarah is our family’s Clark Griswold of Christmas. She tries to make each Christmas party extraordinary. Sarah is not my biological Aunt. She is the youngest sister of my stepfather, William Richards, a burly, retired Naval engineer in his second career as a borderline alcoholic who watches television game shows. My birth father, Larry “the Lizard” Nosrac, is in prison for an insurance scam that went very bad and morphed into witness tampering and menacing.

Two days after my 19th Christmas, when I was two years into my training for delinquency and law-bending, my mother took a break from her trio of not so wise men and made a two-thousand-mile drive to Albuquerque for a respite. Her respite has lasted 21 years. Mom sends a card each Christmas from a trailer park near the entrance to the Hopi Indian Reservation, where she shares a doublewide with a lady named Yellow Flower.

As you may discern, the bloodlines of our family are not pure. We are more like blood splatters at a crime scene. For example, Aunt Sarah’s only child, a boy named Malika, who is now 17, was adopted from Kenya, is mentally challenged and lives in a group home. We refer to him as Mal. Nobody thinks much about his past. We all think about his future.

Depending on health and legal situations, our annual Christmas parties consist of about a dozen misfits who hang together by the thread of the party and the steely determination of Aunt Sarah.

Ever inventive, each Christmas, Aunt Sarah’s invitations have a theme. In theory, these themes are fascinating. In practice, her theme Christmas parties can be iffy.

The Sing-Along Christmas was a dud. Only Sarah and Ann Marie, my incarcerated father’s pen gal’s fiancé, had the guts to sing. Mal hummed atonally, and the rest of us squirmed at the nonstop duet and our psychological inability to participate in singing Silent Night.

The Sleigh Ride Christmas theme was a dud due to a week of warm weather and thunderstorms.

The White Elephant Christmas wasn’t bad. Mal was confused by the instructions. Instead of one mysterious random gift, he arranged for his group home aide to purchase two dozen plastic elephants about the size of volleyballs, and Mal hand-painted them white. I keep my white elephant next to the bowl where I toss my car keys and smile every time I see the dang thing.

The recent Christmases have been challenging.

Besides her annual theme, Sarah is on a quest to reintroduce human conversation. The assault began a few years ago when she disconnected her cable. Ergo, the Christmas parties have no football, old movies, nothing. The next wave was when, in 2021, upon entry, she collected everyone’s cell phone, tossed them in a red sack, and locked the bag in a wall safe. Sixteen-year-old Daphne, a goth lass who I believe is related to Uncle Mike’s half-sister, made claw marks on the wall near the safe, trying to get her phone back.

The forced conversations exacerbated political schisms. Without naming names, two red hats and two blue hats make everyone else nervous. We want them to shut up and lighten up. Last year, one of the debaters showed up with a holstered gun beneath his nylon puffy parka because, “it is my right.”

While the rest of us Christmas visitors scurried from the foyer like migrating geese from a pond, Aunt Sarah used all her considerable charms and made the point that this was Christmas and her house. Finally, Uncle Mike locked the gun in the safe with the phones, barely avoiding a desperate lunge by the long-taloned Daphne for her hostage phone.

It was at this tense moment that Trey saved Christmas. I told everyone to sit down and calm down. Amazingly, they did. I leapfrogged ahead of Sarah’s careful sequence where we dined before opening gifts and distributed my Christmas-themed gifts that asked us to “Fit your gifts on a single sheet of paper in a sealed envelope.”

They each opened the envelope and read.

I set up a personal Xpressbet horse wagering account using your names and email addresses.

Your password for logging in is (christmas12*1). I also deposited 50 dollars into your account and set your preferences to harness racing. There are links with tutorials for those who know nothing about gambling on horse racing. The horses are not racing on Christmas, but when you have time, use this money to wager on a few races and see if you can grow your $50 to a $100. Have fun.

PS. You cannot reload your account money using MY credit card. This card is in pieces in my wastebasket.

PPS. If you think this is stupid and do not want to try gambling on a few races, please let me know next Christmas so the money does not go to waste.

Merry Christmas, Trey.