The Griswold's storm the north shore.

My family is incapable of celebrating a holiday in any sort of normal fashion. Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays, hell, Boxing Day, there is some sort of major dramz that is bound to happen. On the up side, it provides countless hours of material and laughter, on the down side, there's no amount of Xanax or red wine to keep my nerves steady through what can be 72+ hours of what seems like a bad scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, although we can make Jack Nicholson look like Doug Funny compared to some of the stuff that goes down at my house. This Christmas was no exception.

Because of some things that have been going on, my family hasn't had the easiest 2008. In light of this, we were all looking forward to having a great Christmas because it was going to be a time for us to all be together, it meant the end of the year was close, yada, yada, yada.

In preparation for this family get together, my faux step dad aka FSD (trust me, this is the only term that works for him, my mom and him have been dating since I was 9, I'm 23, you do the math, he's no longer the "boyfriend," that's just awkward for everyone), anyways, he and I were running around trying to prepare appetizers for ourselves, my mom, my sister and my brother.

We all planned to have a nice sit down in front of the tree on Christmas Eve with hors d'oeuvres and drinks. FSD and I decided to pull things together for everyone, mainly because my mom's idea of getting food together is throwing on her military garb and channeling Kim Jong-Il to bark orders at her unsuspecting children, needless to say, we decided to take things into our own hands.

We had quite the spread: crabcakes, shrimp, gourmet cheeses and bread, dips galore and enough wine to make a large village in Moldova party like it's 1992 and being accepted into the UN was as easy as becoming the Republic of Moldova in the first place.

FSD loves to give speeches so we all settled in, drinks in hand, to listen to his wrap up of 2008. Not more than fifteen words rolled off his tongue when I see my 80 year old cat - who literally is probably 112, weighs about 6.2 ounces, my mom talks to like a human and threatens to put a bonnet on and start calling him baby- jumps out of the base of our Christmas tree like Cujo was snapping at him from below my mom's red velour tree skirt and lands with a thud. As I'm watching my cat put Kristie Yamaguchi to shame as he lands a triple axle with grace, out of the corner of my eye I see our tree start to waver. Now granted I'm a few glasses of wine in, but this would have had to have been a straight hallucination because I swore I saw the thing move side to side. Not quick enough could my synapses fire to each another to tell me to get up and position my body in front of the tree to prevent what was about to happen in t-minus, 3.....2......1.....CRASH.

My mom's tree - which only contains Christopher Radko ornaments that usually go for $40-100 a pop - comes crashing to the ground. My mom says that she didn't even hear the tree fall, but that my face scrunched into a Lord of the Rings Gollum-esque mask and she knew something horrible had happened.

See my mom doesn't deal well with stress or unexpected events, coupled with the year she's had, this was the last thing that we needed to happen to us. Granted, I was literally dying inside of laughter because, truly, this would only happen to my family on Christmas Eve, but my mom was bawling on the outside. I literally had to spend the next two hours talking her off the ledge because she was so upset by what had happened. To her credit we did lose about 65% of the ornaments, and they really are beautiful, but I mean come on people.... we can't all fall apart, on Christmas Eve of all nights, because the tree fell!

Instead we should rejoice in the fact that we are one step closer in our apparent life long quest to have more f-ed up things happen to our family then the Griswold's. If only my cat had electrocuted itself would we have truly surpassed Clark, Ellen, Rusty and Audrey to become the Griswold's of the North Shore.

But, hey, a girl can dream and......

there's always next year.

No one's getting out alive,

heels