Briefly: Gift Giving
It is Christmas Eve, and I have a cinnamon roll. It's no glamorous Instagram-worthy homemade one - it's one of those little Pillsbury cans with the orange icing. I don't like it as much as the bog standard icing ones but my girlfriend loves the stuff, so I humored her today and made them for her.
Our Christmas plans are also not very glamorous, either - her aunt was coming over to stay the night, we're going to get Chinese takeout for dinner, and her aunt will leave tomorrow morning. I really don't like her aunt, significantly more than I don't like cinnamon rolls with orange icing. She's a pretty irritable drunk that, when drunk, says some really downright despicable shit - and even when she says she's stopped drinking, the second she finds out there's alcohol she's like flies to shit on it. She's had multiple DUI's but they haven't been "severe" enough to have her license revoked, somehow. Even though she hasn't really treated me wrong for any reason, she's always rather mean and dismissive to my girlfriend because she is trans and disabled. However, because she's her grandma's kid, her grandma enables her to treat her like shit anyway. Thusly, any time there's a hint that her aunt’s going to be around, the air in the house sours.
It is also today that I realized that I didn't really get her much of anything for Christmas.
Like, we went to Bath & Body Works and got some body washes and lotions that my girlfriend's grandma thinks she'd like. And I set aside a bracelet for her. But it's piecemeal shit compared to the gifts I got for my girlfriend (driving out to the only Best Buy in Arizona that still had the Legend of Zelda OLED Switch in stock), or for my own family back in Ohio (I've known them for the more than 20 years I've been on this Earth, I know what they all like).
And it's like, I think most people have that person in their lives - someone who is still technically "family" that you genuinely fucking despise but, by obligation, you cannot remove them from your life unless they remove themselves from yours. My older sister was this for a time - she exited out of our family's lives because her deadbeat husband kept trying to steal our mom's Vicodin to snort (y'know, the incredibly addictive opioid painkillers that our mom needed to function what with her extremely severe joint pains and Lupus and other ailments she deals with on a daily basis, that she kept locked in a safe in her bedroom at the time because it's a fucking narcotic - as far as I can tell she's taking a non-opioid alternative but I'm not sure what) and was somehow confused and outright offended at our mom because she was extremely fucking pissed about that.
But there's also this sort of obligation that I feel for Christmas, y'know, where if I'm giving gifts, I gotta make it somewhat equal. I made my mom some homemade jewelry with little emerald beads I bought off Fire Mountain, she bought me this Edible Arrangement out of the blue that came in at 8PM while it was pouring down rain (it was very touching. I like the chocolate covered apples. I just wish I got a heads up about it, that poor Edible Arrangements employee was driving in said pouring rain).
And it's like - it's really not that big of a deal. I don't know her aunt, and her aunt doesn't know me. I think, objectively, it's fine to just give her the couple little funny smell-goods I got for sale and leave the big-budget stuff to the people I actually care about.
But the squishy feel-good part of me still hates the thought, y'know?