Christmas Eve with the Family

Christmas Eve at the house in Grand Rapids, everybody in one room for once. Grandma held down her chair in the sweater vest with the Christmas tree pinned to it, and the guys lined up behind her before dinner, one of them still in his Michigan Rugby t-shirt because apparently that counts as dressed for the holiday.

After that it went the way it always goes — couch, wine, somebody's green bottle of beer, and then the two of them shoving each other's faces around next to the coffee table with the Santa snow globe sitting right there, unbroken, somehow.

Nobody wanted the evening to be anything more than that, and it wasn't.