a christmas story to warm the cockles of your heart

Years ago, when I lived in Olympia, WA with my ex-boyfriend and his son (we'll call them Justin and Jonah, respectively) we decided to forego all the insane holiday traveling in lieu of staying home and being sane. Consequently, Justin's sister, Dawn, decided to fly up from California to spend the holidays with us, which was just fine by me.

I'd never really met Dawn before, though I'd heard all about her. She was a born-again Christian, so that colored my expectations of her a little bit. Upon meeting her, I found that she had a pretty sassy personality, and seemed born-again only in name, not in deeds. However, she still didn't swear or drink, or do anything else that I found particularly fun, so there you go.

Well, now Olympia never really got very cold, so when an ice storm hit the area, we were all a bit shocked. Ice kinda sucked. Specially when you lived in a place where 99% of the people had never driven under even remotely adverse conditions. Unless you count an awful lot of rain.

My friend had loaned me her car, a 1966 Corvair station wagon, in perfect condition, with fins and everything, while she was at home in California for Christmas. So during the bad weather, Justin and I were tooling around in my friend's car, because hers actually had heat and windows that rolled all the way up. And down.

Justin, Jonah, Dawn and I decided that a quick trip to the grocery store to buy things for Christmas dinner would be a good idea, and headed out to Cub Foods, a store about five minutes away from our home. The parking lot of Cub foods was gently sloped, and we parked out towards the back of the lot with our car pointed downhill so that if we slid, we'd slide into an embankment.

We hopped out of the car and carefully made our way across the lot, as it was covered in a couple of inches of ice. All of us were in a pretty silly mood, and bounced around for a bit in the vestibule of the store before going in. While we were messing around by the doors, an older lady comes stomping in and glares at us, then grabs a cart and pushes it into the store. We followed a couple of minutes later, and started to load up.

In every single aisle, we ended up meeting the grouchy older lady going in the opposite direction. We tried to make a joke out of it, and pretended that she was reverse stalking us. Our attempts to get her involved in our good mood failed, and she continued to stomp around the store.

We checked out, and started the perilous journey back across the parking lot to our car. About halfway there we started to hear shouting, and by the time we got to where we had parked, we found the grouchy old lady yelling at a bag boy (who, by the way, was coatless) who had helped her get her groceries out to her car. Which was parked behind ours. Which had slid downhill into the bumper of our car.

The lady insisted that the bag boy call the cops, because we had obviously hit her car, and we were total degenerates who had been completely evil and awful and had caused all kinds of damage to her precious BMW.

Whatever. So while we were waiting for the cops, the lady stood there and refused to look at us. When a policeman did finally show up to the scene, he took one look at it and immediately told the woman her car had slid into ours and she needed to chill out.

Grouchy old lady started berating the cop, telling him that he was incompetent, that we were obvious criminals and should be arrested, blah blah blah... this went on for about five minutes before the cop told her to shut the hell up and get over it before he wrote her a ticket for hitting our car.

There was no damage done to either car.

At this point, Dawn had about enough of the lady being an ass, so Dawn just lays into her. Calling her every name in the book, telling the lady exactly what she thought of her, in NO uncertain terms, and generally just flaying this woman alive. Justin, Jonah and I were all standing there, open mouthed, watching Dawn take this woman down.

The woman finally gets in her car and drives off. The cop, my companions and myself were all standing there, discussing our mutual disbelief in the situation, when the lady drives back into the parking lot, drives past us flipping us the bird, and yells:

"YOU RUINED MY FUCKING CHRISTMAS"

at which point we all just lost it laughing and could barely breathe...

Anyway, on Christmas day, Jonah, then eight, got a toy which the dog ran off with, and he turns around and yells at the dog "YOU RUINED MY FUCKING CHRISTMAS" and since then it's become a refrain for whomever has been in my home around Christmastime.

Of course, I have to tell that story to everyone.

Merry fucking Christmas, y'all.