One week out from Christmas, and the flurry of cards is starting to come in. My personal favorites are the ones where they simply sign their name. What, no letter? No picture? People, seriously. Don’t even bother wasting good postage on that shit.
As verbose as I can be, it may come as a surprise that untitledmother is one such name-signer. Last year, she sent a Christmas card featuring nothing more than her name and a gold-embossed baby Jesus. Talk about the odd couple.
So there he was, a clearly Caucasian, clearly 6-month old baby lying naked in a bed of hay. I mean, let’s be honest. A baby with that kind of girth could never squeeze through a woman’s cooch, even if it belonged to one blessed virgin. Between this and the cradle of hay, it’s all the proof I need that the Bible is a sham. It would take all the Desitin in the world to un-chap baby Jesus’ ass. Unless, of course, being the son of God and all meant he would never be burdened with such mortal irritations. But then what about the nails in the hands and feet and that bloody crown of thorns? What were those, if not huge motherfucking mortal irritations? But I digress.
This year, she decided to give the Christ child a rest (a much-needed sabbatical, I might add) and pull some holiday ha-ha squarely out her ass:
Now, from anyone else, this card would be hilarious. But coming from her, I immediately start looking for the hidden Satanic backmasking track. And then it came to me — this was a cry for help. She had been depressed lately, which wasn’t a huge surprise to me. Her weight had increased to 240 pounds, which is a lot for someone who is 4′11″. Her legs are sand-crab skinny, and although I have never measured it, I can confidently report that the circumference of her neck is more than likely greater than that of her head. Her proportions are such that she could dress up as a plumb bob for Halloween wearing nothing more than what’s already in her closet. To top it off, she teases her thinning bleach-blonde hair into this shell-like formation that hovers defiantly above her scalp. A few spins in a department store’s revolving door and I’d dare you to deny the resemblance to one of those troll dolls.
Now that you have a visual cemented in your brain, her Christmas card takes on new meaning, doesn’t it? Don’t you all of a sudden feel bad for her, as if she was that poor little man on the rooftop? I no sooner had pulled her card out of the envelope when I picked up the phone to call her. True, she has dumped a lot of shit on me in the past, but I wanted to make sure she was OK. I wanted her to know that even if she was one beanie shy of becoming Humpty Dumpty, by god her daughter would come through. When she answered, the first thing she said was, “Did you get my card?” I replied, “Yes, Mom, I did.” Before I could extend even a singular word of support, she blurts out, “Now I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings with that card. It was meant to be funny.” Oh snap!
All this goes to prove one point. Physically, my mom may be ugly. But her most ghastly feature is that which you cannot see.
