Guilt Trip: The Other Holiday Tradition

Ever notice how much trouble the holidays seem to cause? Between Halloween and Valentines Day are some of the most stressful and aggravating family situations known to mankind. Every Thanksgiving I have to suffer through the traditional family dinner, with a hefty helping of the traditional guilt trip, and a heated argument for dessert.
Typically these events include my Great Aunts (My father’s people) bemoaning the fact that I am not married yet (I’m in my middle twenties folks), that I haven’t produced another great-great niece or nephew for them to spoil (Again I’m only in my twenties), and that I simply refuse to dress in what they consider a feminine way.
Dress is a dirty word when it comes to me. These socially impressed articles of clothing are uncomfortable, ill-fitting, and completely against my idea of who I am as a person. Nearly all of my cousins and the other children in the neighborhood were male, so playing baseball or jumping on a trampoline in a dress was entirely out of the question. Besides that, most dresses have some element of pink in them and I have this intense aversion to anything that is pink. I feel that such things as the color pink, dresses, and the other trappings that define the female gender only hold women back: locking them into a stereotype that cannot be escaped from. Therefore I strive to be different. I wear pants to the exclusion of all else, reserving the dreaded dress for weddings, funerals, Christmas, and Easter. I am rarely seen without a baseball cap or some other form of hat on my head, many with my favorite hockey or baseball team’s logo. I want people to accept me for what I have to say, rather than what I am wearing. My clothes are not the latest style; in fact, I made it through four years of high school only having to buy new shoes and maybe five pairs of blue jeans. Most of my clothes were hand me downs from the one neighbor girl or, oddly enough, from some of my male cousins.
It’s odd that these elderly ladies bemoan my unfemininity when it is the fact that I had so many male relatives influencing me in my formative years. In many ways I have always been considered one of the guys. Most of my childhood friends were male and I just seemed to be one of the guys, even to this very day. I now have trouble trying to behave in more feminine ways, I tend to speak first and ask what I did wrong later, kind of like most guys I know. This is just the sort of thing that drives my aunts and my mother out of their minds. These women are constantly lamenting the fact that I would rather have a new hockey jersey than a floral patterned monstrosity for my birthday. A new baseball cap is preferable to makeup. In fact I see no point in paying good money for paint for your face, when you are just going to wash it down the drain at the end of the day. The other form of the traditional holiday guilt trip comes from my own mother. My mother bitches ( for lack of a better word) at me because I am not the child she set out to raise, how I am a constant disappointment to her, and that I take what is her hard work and pass it off as my own. It’s the little things that bother my mother. How I answer a question, what I say, what I think, why I am not as “productive a human being as someone my age should be.”
An example of this would be how my own mother ruined my Christmas Eve last year because I took some of the baked goods she had made (and there was a ton of this sugar laden stuff), mixed them with what I had done, and filled gift bags for my boyfriend’s family (along with things I had created myself). She cornered me after the evening church service and bawled me out, loudly, in our driveway over a few lousy cookies and chocolate covered pretzels. I mean the neighbors across the river could have heard her screaming at me.The funny thing is they same treats had to be thrown out a little after New Years because they were not consumed. This year she began her tirade earlier than usual, telling me that I was not to give away anything she bakes and if I want to give baked goods away, I can bake them all myself. I told her that she could keep her cookie, very politely, when what I really meant was she could take her cookies and shove them up her ass. Her defense is that she has never met the people to whom I gave those god damn cookies, when in truth she has always declined to met them.
Anyway to end this little rant and rave session, I suppose that is better to spend the holidays a select group of people, or alone. The fewer the people, the less chance you will have of suffering a Holiday guilt trip.