S2: Happyish Holidays: The Christmas Curse

It’s the time of year when we at Feelings and Co bring you a story about the holiday season, and all of the ways it can go wrong, feel terrible or not live up to the sparkle of a Kay Jeweler Christmas commercial.

This year, we have an epic tale of how one family was CURSED for four Christmases. Each year, a new member of the family took a turn ruining the holiday, which Included fires, hurt feelings, late night plumbers and many, many Christmas Eve shifts at Old Navy.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

---

Um, how are you? Most people answer that question with fine or good.

But obviously, it’s not always fine, and it’s usually not even that good. This is a podcast that asks people to be honest about their pain. To just be honest about how they really feel, about the hard parts of life.

And guess what? It’s complicated. I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Terrible.

Thanks for asking. It’s that time of year again. Glittering trees, beautiful meals shared with a beautiful group of people gathered around a beautiful table.

Carolers wandering the streets with a song in their hearts. Everyone you meet is kind, reflective, brimming with gratitude for all that they have, ready to make magic for one another.

Or maybe not, because the only thing that is as certain as death and taxes is that no matter how much tinsel, sugar, special gifts and mashed potatoes you bring into your life this holiday season, something, somewhere will still hit the fan.

Life and all of the weird curveballs it likes to throw at us, even though we’ve made it clear we don’t play baseball, life doesn’t take a holiday break. People still get sick from November to January. People die every day.

Doesn’t matter what day it is. Heartbreak doesn’t decide, you know what? I’m going to take some time off and I’ll be back in the New Year.

Sometimes, these special days are just another day because whatever else is going on in our lives is all consuming or because one person’s holy religious day or secular holiday is just another person’s Tuesday.

This is Happyish Holidays, our annual Terrible, Thanks for Asking tradition where we bring you real holiday stories, where things go wrong even when you planned everything right. This year, our episode is a story in four acts.

A story from a listener named Brianna, who’s going to bring all of us on an Ebenezer Scrooge-like journey through four Christmases past. This is The Christmas Curse. Chapter One, Diamonds Are Not Forever.

So in my family, it’s my two parents, my mom and my dad, they’ve been together, ooh, almost.

It’s definitely over 35 years by now. And then it’s just my brother and me. We are just under two years apart in age.

I grew up in a family where my parents were very young when they had both me and my brother. They were not yet 23 when we were both born. So a lot of the rest of the year was lean times, trying to just make it through.

But Christmas was the time where we just went all out with the spoiling and the gift giving and the showing how much we love each other in that way.

2007 was a time of transition for Brianna’s family. Her older brother had just joined the military and Brianna was a senior in high school. Joining the military is not like going off to college.

They don’t have a Christmas break. Brianna’s brother isn’t sure if he’s going to make it home for Christmas.

This is really the time where we transitioned from nuclear family unit who does Christmas together and that’s never a question to it’s going to look different now.

And so I realize now that my parents probably had a lot of really deep feelings going into this Christmas that I probably just didn’t have a lot of visibility to because I was a senior in high school who was focused on all of my own things.

And so I also think at this time because my brother and I were getting out of the house, we were starting to move on to be technically legally adults doing our own thing.

And my parents were really at a state I think with their own finances where those lean years we really had growing up weren’t the state of our family anymore.

And I think that’s really where my dad was probably coming to this with is like he wanted to get my mom something really special, really nice, something that he probably wasn’t able to get her most Christmases, especially because they were funneling

a lot of that into us kids. So the stakes are that Christmas looks a little different now. We don’t know what it’s going to look like in the future.

Every year for the foreseeable future is going to be kind of a shrug until really close to the holiday. But the one consistent is going to be that my mom and dad will be together for the holiday.

And so that’s the state of things going into Christmas. This is the attitude my dad brings then when he approaches me and is like, I want to do something for mom.

Can you help me?

What dad decided was that he wanted to get Brianna’s mom a nice piece of jewelry. And if you are a suburban dad who has been on a budget for decades, there’s only one place to buy such a special gift.

This Christmas, how do you thank her for choosing you with a three-stone diamond ring from Kay Jeweler’s, where you can be assured of two things?

So he brings me the Kay Jeweler’s catalog that had come in the mail and had cornered me somewhere in the house to be like, I’m going to go to the North Town Mall and get this thing for your mom, and I want your opinion. Do you want to come with me?

And I’m like, yes, I do. I would love to go on an Inventure for Love. I’m 17 years old.

I think that’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened. Let’s get in the car and go this very second. So we grew up in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.

We drive to the North Town Mall up in Coon Rapids, and we go to the jeweler and they bring out the necklace my dad had seen in the catalog, and he tells me, so this is a star necklace. It’s all these diamonds made into a star.

My mom was in cover bands at the time. Like she did a lot of like cover band music at like bars and restaurants and things, and he’s like, I want to get this for her so that she has something nice to wear.

If we ever go to like a formal setting, I know it’s not going to be her necklace forever, but I want her to know that she’s my rock star. I know, and that was my exact reaction.

It comes with a free teddy bear that he lets me have for being his adventure buddy, and we go home and he hides it. I don’t remember where he hid it.

He might have even given it to me to hide, but he hides it and he’s just like pleased as punch because the entire time I am being his hype woman, like this is the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen.

If I got something like this that was so personally picked for me, I would die. You are awesome. She’s going to love this.

I can’t wait for Christmas. This is the thing I’m looking forward to with you, Dad, and he’s just sitting there so giddy while he’s driving home. He’s like, this is just the greatest thing that has ever happened.

I cannot wait for Christmas. This is going to be wonderful.

And it gets even more wonderful, because Brianna’s brother calls them to say he will be able to come home for Christmas.

What was going to be a weird Christmas is now just a normal Christmas, and on Christmas Eve, the four of them sit in the living room, an open presence, just like they always have.

Everyone’s happy. We’ve got the tree in the living room. We’ve had a nice dinner.

We’re all going around opening presents. I’m sitting there just like waiting for it to be mom’s turn. And my dad has, of course, cued everything up so that like that’s going to be the last present.

Before that present is opened, my mom opens her present from my brother, and he gets her this like dog tag necklace that says Air Force Mom, because he’s in the Air Force. And it’s a sweet gift. It’s like maybe a $15 necklace.

She fawns over it so much. I think she might have even immediately put it on. She’s like, this is so wonderful.

I love this. I’m going to wear this all the time. I love you so much, honey.

Thank you, thank you.

I can see this. And I know he got it from like the shop on base too. Oh, yeah.

Oh, for sure.

I wouldn’t be surprised if like when we went to his base graduation, she had like looked at something like that and then just decided to get something else. And then he just like clocked into the back of his mind.

Oh, well, okay, Christmas is taking care of. We’re done. So this is the tone of Christmas present giving.

As my dad finally gets like his last gift and he gives it to mom.

And he gives her kind of the same preamble he gave me at the mall where he’s like, I wanted to give you something really special to let you know that you’re my rock star and she opens it. And the response is essentially, Oh, thanks, honey.

End of response. I’m sitting there so confused. My dad looks devastated.

And then it’s just like, okay, do we want to watch a movie?

What’s up? While your dad is like, Oh, God.

Very clearly dying inside because like I, my dad and I are on a very similar wavelength. And so I’m looking at him like, he could melt into the floor right now and just disappear. This is the part that at the time just broke my heart the most.

Apparently, she eventually approached my dad and was like, Hey, we’re all going to go to the Mall of America in a couple days because like our tradition at this point in our family is we’re going to go to the Mall of America.

We’ve got all of our gifts at this point. We’re going to do like returns or exchanges for things we don’t like. We’re going to take gift cards and cash we got and go have fun.

And so she approaches my dad about deciding, I think I want to return the necklace. And so we go to the Kay Jewelers that’s at the Mall of America.

We return the necklace and she proceeds to spend the money for the necklace on just like tops at Deb and Wet Seal. And my mom was also like because of her like cover band stuff, she’d buy some stuff at Hot Topic.

Just like very like small incidental things.

She’s being a practical shopper. She’s being practical.

Yes. And she’s she’s maximizing quantity of things over like one big purchase because she was just handed a nice amount of money to go spend at a mall she really enjoys.

And my brother is just like blissfully unaware of everything and just like walking around a mall, enjoying the fact that he got to choose how long his shower was today.

And my dad is just like, have you seen Arrested Development where George Michael like is hanging his head in the Snoopy music is playing? The entire mall trip.

And I am just like quietly fuming because I know I can’t say anything to my mom because I’m still, I am in this scenario still the only child. I am dependent on my parents still at this point. But I’m just quietly seething.

I remember thinking like if I grow up and get married to someone who thinks this hard about a present and writes his own little speech and like sits next to me all sweetly telling me about it, I would die. How could she do this?

Writes a speech?

As an adult, I have a lot more empathy for it. I understand how hard it is to get a gift that you don’t necessarily love or you really don’t see yourself using it as much, but you see other things that you think would bring you more immediate joy.

But at the time, I was just like, this is the worst Christmas ever. All of a sudden, the tone now of the rest of this week is, my dad trying not to let his emotions out while clearly being miserable.

One bad gift exchange isn’t the end of the world, no. But what they don’t know as they walk around the Mall of America, a place for fun in your life as the commercial promised us, they are just at the beginning of their family’s Christmas curse.

Chapter Two, Thar She Blows. By 2008, Brianna has graduated high school and has just finished her first semester of college. Her brother is still in the military and her parents are in their first year of being empty nesters.

This year, the curse started early, on Thanksgiving, when Brianna’s dad started having chest pains.

At Thanksgiving, his parents were over, my grandparents were over and he was basically leaning over the table and my grandma was staring daggers into his eyes like you need to go to the hospital now.

But no, dad waits until the next day.

My dad comes in and is like, hey, I took care of this and that. I’m going to go drive myself to the ER now and my mom and I go, what?

Guys, I’m having a heart attack. I got to drive myself up to the hospital. You don’t mind, do you?

I mean, it was a very classic dad move and he smoked a cigarette on the way there to which I said, do you really think that’s a good idea?

And he said, well, too late now.

Smoke them if you got them.

I drove him to the ER, left him there overnight to be observed, came home to my mom saying, yeah, they called five minutes after you left. He had a heart attack. I now have to go.

Ultimately, the doctor said that, and God knows this has just then fueled my dad’s stubbornness ever since, that what my dad did was the right thing because on Thanksgiving, they probably would have seen it was gas, but on Friday, that’s when the

heart attack happened. He had a heart attack Friday. He finally came home Saturday, and Sunday, it’s like, well, you’ve got finals, bye, because these classes aren’t cheap. Yeah.

So going into the holiday, we’re all just very aware of, I think, our mortality and the fragility of our family, and my dad has this heart attack at a young age. They tell him, if you’d gone to bed at night, you probably wouldn’t have woken up.

So we’re all just very sensitive to how lucky we got and to how the time we have together will always end up being finite. Cut to Christmas Eve morning.

I go to my shift at Old Navy, and I drive home high on $10 sweaters and a caribou mocha I didn’t have to pay for. Being like, cool, I got holiday money in the bank. Everything’s great.

I pull up to the house and there’s this giant plumber’s van in the driveway. And I think, that’s odd. Didn’t think we were having anyone over today.

I don’t know if we know anyone who is a plumber.

What’s up?

I walk in to the upper level of our house is basically completely blocked off. That’s where all of our bedrooms are. It’s also where the only bathroom that has a shower in it is.

All these strange people walking through my house. I kind of give a look to my parents and one of them says something like, so your brother was taking a shower? We don’t really know what happened.

All we know is at some point, your dad noticed water coming down the walls of the family room.

We do need running water in our homes, but it’s best if it stays in the pipes. Water in the walls is not good and getting the water to stop flowing through the walls requires professionals, plumbers, emergency plumbers on Christmas Eve, many of them.

What did the house look like over Christmas Eve and Christmas? Can you describe it?

There’s definitely draperies put over all of the carpet upstairs to not ruin the carpet with people’s floors or walking in and out.

The bathroom upstairs Christmas Eve and Christmas Day is basically unusable, so it’s like, I hope you took a shower before my brother did because you’re not going to take one for a couple of days.

We’re all sharing the half bath in the slight lower level that’s just a toilet and a sink, and that’s how we’re all trying to get ready.

There might have been a couple of times where we could get around the bathroom construction upstairs, but Christmas Eve, it definitely wasn’t happening. On Christmas Day, it’s possible we maybe got around it a bit more.

But I don’t remember if I had planned to take a shower Christmas Eve night, but I definitely didn’t. So I was going to go into Christmas with my grandparents, super smelly. That was just going to have to be it.

This is their gift exchange night.

And sure, they could wait until tomorrow, but this is the tradition. So they just keep pushing things back. 4 p.m., 5 p.m., 6 p.m., until the plumbers leave at 9 p.m.

Not only are we just kind of sitting in the living room waiting, but like, we can see everything happening.

They can see us. Everything’s kind of on top of each other.

Our elderly neighbors who live next door, whose kids were all kind of grown, were planning to come over to have a dinner with us, and then they were going to essentially just like hang out while we did our gift exchange.

So all of us are just sitting here. We might have even waited to eat until they left because by 9 p.m., every single person in that house was very grouchy. And I’m sitting there looking at my brother, like, what did you do?

Why did you do? To this day, I do not know what he did in that bathroom. I don’t know why everything leaked so horribly.

I was so, like, high on life and the drop was so far down. And the reconstruction of our bathroom and our family room ended up taking weeks.

So, they probably took a couple days off around Christmas, but, like, they were there in and out for weeks later. I’d ended up over that winter break from college getting my wisdom teeth out.

So, like, I’m sitting there recovering from surgery while, like, people are trying to reconstruct our bathroom. So, it just, it wasn’t just a one-day thing.

It just ended up bleeding into all of the days following and all of the, like, time I was home from college all of the time. He was home from the military, was just fixing the bathroom.

Clearly, the curse is ramping up. We started with a flop of a gift, heartbreak. But it’s escalated to heart attacks and expensive bathroom renovations.

And for those of you keeping score at home, we have one Christmas where mom ruined it, one Christmas where her brother ruined it, and when we come back, Brianna tells us about the Christmas of 2009 and who the curse touched that year.

Chapter Three, Old Navy Waits for Nobody. It’s time for 2009.

My hair.

This one is me.

This one is very much on me. So the night before Christmas Eve, I’d come home from work and my gas tank was low. But I don’t think the light had turned on quite yet.

And I was 19 and irresponsible and cold. And I mean, I guess to my credit also, I was a woman who might have had to go to a gas station alone at night. So I decided not to get gas.

I was like, I’ll definitely wake up tomorrow morning early enough to get gas on the way there. I’m going to be fine. It’s going to be fine.

Christmas Eve morning, I obviously don’t do that. I obviously sleep until the moment I absolutely have to wake up. I go out to start my car so that it’s warm because it is slightly snowing and the low fuel light is just on.

I’m panicked because I definitely don’t have time to get gas and drive through the snow to get to work on time. And Old Navy takes Christmas Eve very seriously.

There’s a lot of people that are potentially going to be coming in except spoiler alert, no one comes in, but they think it’s going to be the end of the world and so they plan for that.

So I’m carrying the anxiety of, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, I can’t be late, I can’t be late, I can’t be late. And I wake up my dad and I say, I’m so sorry, can you drive me to work? And then when I come home, I’ll go fill the car with gas.

And you know, he sighs, but also he relates because he is like me. We find out 14 years later, turns out we both have ADHD. So he’s coming at it with some empathy, but also annoyance because he now has to drive in the snow to take me to work.

I’m like, I can’t get myself to Old Navy in time. So he takes me there, he drops me off. He’s like, I’ll come pick you up at two.

If you get off work early because there’s no customers like every other freaking year, call me, I’ll come get you.

So that doesn’t happen because on the way home, he’s driving through a busy intersection and a car all of a sudden just turns left and hits my dad’s car. So he gets out of the car, he does all of the checking things.

There’s a witness that stops for a second and is like, everybody okay? Everyone’s physically okay. Pretty dang huge dent in the car.

My dad later tells me that as he’s talking to the person who hit him, it’s very clear that this person had maybe had a really early morning dental appointment because they look like they’re just on laughing gas or something.

Side note, they were probably not coming from a dental appointment early Christmas Eve morning. This did not register in the interview, but I have to assume this witness was just high on something other than laughing gas.

They’re on some kind of medication that is maybe not giving them the best judgment at the moment. The witness says very clearly, no, the light had not turned green for the green arrow. This guy just drove out of nowhere.

But because it’s Christmas Eve, the witness says, yeah, but I can’t hang out. I got places to go and doesn’t stay for when the police officer finally arrives.

I got some more to be too.

So then when the police officer arrives and gets everyone’s statements and gets all of that, police officer is like, well, we can’t prove that he didn’t have a green light or a yellow arrow or something.

So we can’t treat this as a like 100% fault accident for that guy. So my dad is then driving home with this giant dent in his car, knowing that he’s probably going to at least partially have to pay for the repair of it.

And it’s definitely our oldest car. So I can’t remember if it ended up being totaled or if we just got a new car, or he got a new car not long after that. But he’s very not happy about it.

And so either he or my mom calls me to be like, yeah, we’re gonna go put gas in your car and then we’ll pick you up because this car is just completely out of commission.

For the longest time, because I was a stubborn 19 year old, I was like, no, no, no, dad ruined this one. He ruined this Christmas because he’s the one who got in an accident.

But it was very clear that the car would not have been on the road in that intersection at that time if I had just gotten myself up early enough to get gas or had gotten gas the night before. I concede that this one is mine.

I ruined this Christmas because, I mean, we’re going into this Christmas super happy that like no one’s had a medical event. My brother is going to be coming home for Christmas. There’s no present that has a lot of like pressure on it this year.

But still, the curse has struck her family once again.

Like a wild-eyed driver coming from the dentist struck her father’s car. Like pipes mysteriously bursting in a wall. Like a rejected necklace from renowned jeweler Kay.

One is unfortunate. Two is barely a chain. But three is undeniably a curse.

And at this point, Brianna and her family start to wonder, is this how every Christmas will go? After the break, the Christmas Curse continues with Chapter 4, What’s That Smell?

Chapter 4, What’s That Smell?

2010. For me, this was my final year in college because I had done PSEO. So this was the last year I was going to be coming home for Christmas from my college town.

We didn’t know what the future Christmases were going to look like. Was I going to be moving back in with my parents? Was I going to get a place by myself?

My dad was really hoping it was going to be the latter because my mom and I did not get along super well when I came home for the summer. And he was like, I don’t know that I really want to live in that forever.

So I’m at this point where I’m having all of the anxiety of like, what happens now? Where am I going to live? How am I going to make money?

How do I feed myself? This is also the first Christmas I bring my now husband home. The addition of who’s this new person?

Will this person stay around for all these Christmases to come? We like this person more than the person you’ve brought home for Christmas before. So that’s good.

But what does this mean? You’re going to his sister’s house for Christmas. How many more Christmases are you going to be doing together?

And we’re kind of getting out of this transitionary period where we’re then going full speed into adulthood. And whatever we start to build after 2010 is probably going to be the long term.

This is what Christmas looks like. Does this boyfriend who doesn’t know that someday he’ll be your husband, does he know your family’s recent track record?

He does. He absolutely does. And I think we went into Christmas Day so happy because we’d gotten through Christmas Eve night without any problems.

And I definitely told him that when we saw him on Christmas Day, he was like, nothing happened. Nothing happened.

It’s great.

The curse is over. My dad doesn’t get to ruin a Christmas. He’s very aware.

He thinks it’s funny. And he’s blissfully ignorant to the possibility of anything happening Christmas Day because we’ve gotten through Christmas Eve night without any problems. So Christmas Day comes.

We go to my aunt’s for Christmas. We have a nice time. He meets some of the more extended members of my family.

He meets the grandma that I want approval from and gets it. And his sister on his dad’s side lives not too far away. So they usually have a get together and we decide we’re going to go there together.

I’m going to meet his brother and sister and his niece and nephew who I haven’t met yet. And my family is just going to go home and have a nice restful night watching a Christmas story and eating leftovers from Christmas Eve night. And it’s great.

Cool. We’re in this like just chill part of Christmas. Everything’s fine.

I can’t remember if it was when we were driving to his sister’s or driving home. But I check my phone and there’s just this all caps text message from my mom saying, Dad ruined a Christmas. I text back, what do you mean dad ruined a Christmas?

And she proceeds to tell me that I brought home this like jeweled stocking it from Old Navy because I was still working there because I was still in college. Shout out to Old Navy.

And I’d had a bunch of candy in it from just like various gifts and buying candy from myself. And we had large dogs.

So putting anything on the kitchen counter was not going to be a safe thing because it was going to be potentially grabbed by them while we were out of the house. One of my parents had put it in the microwave.

I don’t know why not on top of like the refrigerator or in a cabinet, but they’d put it in the microwave. To their credit, dogs couldn’t get it. My dad makes himself a little dish of leftovers Christmas day night.

He puts it in the microwave and he does what he always does when he puts something in the microwave.

He walks away to go do something, forgets about the food for like five or 10 minutes before he finally comes back, and he’s like, oh cool, I can eat this now.

Apparently, my brother is the first one to notice because he yells out, is something burning? My mom goes into the kitchen and the microwave is on fire.

It turns out, little plastic jewels and stockings are not supposed to be microwaved, and it had lit a fire inside the microwave.

How did he not see a stocking in the microwave?

ADHD.

What does that smell like?

Just burnt rubber is what it smells like.

It’s so hard in Minnesota to have something smell bad in your house because to open the windows also means to let in truly arctic air and then try to reheat your house.

Yeah. Our kitchen was not super set up to even vent well. We had the one window over the sink.

Yes, classic.

Yeah.

One window.

That’s all you need.

That’s all you need. Then our patio door didn’t go outside. It went out to a three-season porch.

Even if you opened that, there’s still a very large barrier between you and the cold, which in most cases is great. In this case was not.

Yeah. Not great when you have the smell of burning plastic in your home. Is this stocking sentimental to you?

No, but I am the only person in my family who cares about decorating for Christmas at all.

My dad would always help me, and most of the helping would be going into the garage and lifting the things out that I couldn’t. But I would tell my mom, I will put up all of the Christmas decorations by myself and take them down when you want me to.

But we’re not not having a tree. We’re not not putting these things up. And so this is, I don’t think anyone else in my family has a stocking.

And I had bought one for myself because I’m like, well, I want a stocking and I can put this up in my apartment and I can bring it with me to be an adult.

And maybe someday it will become a sentimental stocking because it will be this like hallmark of me building my own traditions. But at the time, it’s just an Old Navy stocking I’d bought that year.

How does your dad feel about finally ruining Christmas?

Horrible. He probably feels the weight of it more than any of us had ever felt the weight of our own Christmases we ruined.

And of the like damages and the cost of it, of the years where that was the focal point, and his was definitely the least expensive Christmas ruining. They bought a new microwave and had to install it.

But considering the cost of a bathroom and family room restructuring and a car, it was really inexpensive.

But I think he not only carried the weight of it because he just felt really bad, but he also knew how much I cared about Christmas decorations and how I was really trying to build that for myself, that I think he carried the weight of like the

possibility of disappointing me very heavily, that when I came inside the house after driving home from my now sister-in-law’s, I was laughing. I was upset for maybe like two minutes of the drive, and then I just broke into hysterical laughter

because I’m like, of course, this is what happened. Of course this happened. What else would happen on Christmas? And so he was, him knowing that like, eventually I wasn’t upset helped.

And my husband thought it was super funny and was also like, how does a person do that? How does that happen?

Again, if you have ADHD, it’s very easy to imagine how this happens. So that’s four cursed Christmases, one for each member of their family. By now, every person in Brianna’s family of origin, that nuclear family has ruined Christmas.

And as Christmas 2011 approached, they all wondered what would happen this year? Whose turn was it going to be to ruin Christmas? And guess what?

Nobody did. Nothing bad happened. The holiday went off without a fire or a heart attack or emergency plumbers dragging tools in the background of their gift exchange.

So do you think that reaching the collector set of four, did that break the curse for your family?

It might have. I think maybe getting out of this, Brianna’s in college and my brother’s in like the first years of military and everything’s tenuous. I think being in that state of our life was really the curse.

It’s very possible that the curse was lifted at that point. It’s possible that by 2011 my now husband had not earned enough place in the family to maybe get us a five time hit. But by 2011, I’m working a job.

I feel like a big person. My now husband and I are living together. I have a 401K.

I have a salary. I pay for my own food. And we all share a Netflix account.

It’s this new state of our family where what we’re building now is going to be what the long term thing is.

Brianna is now in her 30s. She herself is a wife and a mother and can look at this four year period in her family not as a cursed one, but just a big transitional moment.

Her parents were entering a very different phase of parenthood, with their children living their own lives and only coming home a few times a year.

Brianna and her brother were becoming adults and learning hard lessons like how to properly take a shower without ruining the pipes or not waiting till the very last possible second to fill your gas tank. There likely wasn’t, actually, a curse.

It was just four people going through their own personal changes and still trying to come together and enjoy the time of year that always brought them closer.

The one constant in all of these stories, besides Brianna working at Old Navy, is that Brianna’s family was always together when all these mishaps occurred.

The necklace was a bust, and yes, her dad’s feelings were hurt, but it was bought with so much love and admiration for his wife.

Whatever happened with those pipes created chaos and discomfort for the family, but the person who prompted whatever happened with those pipes was her brother, home from the military, enjoying a rare visit with his family at the time that meant so

much to them. The car crash happened when a father was helping his adult daughter out, and the stocking lighting on fires, just that’s funny because ADHD.

Her family had four bad Christmases, but each of those bad Christmases was still centered around them, around being together, loving each other, creating memories, chaotic memories. And that’s a Happyish Holiday.

Nobody’s holiday looks like a Hallmark movie. Most of us go to Christmas and have a triggering conversation about something deeply important to us with a person who is important to us, but also doesn’t quite get us.

There are travel nightmares, there’s financial stress, there’s pressure to perform a happy holiday, a good holiday.

And if you feel any of that pressure, allow me to give you permission to have a bad holiday, an okay holiday, because honestly a bad holiday is just a bad day. And we have those all the time.

There’s nobody grading you on how magical or beautiful your holiday is, so if you don’t have the oomph to give it this year, that’s okay. Every holiday simply cannot be the happiest. Sometimes the best we can hope for is happyish.

I’m wishing all of you a very Happyish Holiday. Happyish Holidays to all. You can listen to all of our previous Happyish Holidays episodes over on our Patreon.

That’s patreon.com/ttfa. You can also subscribe on Apple Plus and find our entire back catalog and all of those Happyish Holidays as well. Happyish is a word I like quite a bit.

I wrote a very simple guided journal for people who hate journaling, for people who are overwhelmed by the idea of having a journal. I called it Happyish. It takes like two minutes a day.

I’m getting really good feedback on it, which is good because it’s literally just based on my journal and I like it. My little ADHD brain likes it, so I like that your brains like it as well.

There’s also an Oracle deck, which is basically like you just pick a card. It gives you a little message. I do it that you can pick a card weekly, daily, whatever you want.

We also have a Happyish Holidays mailbag that we did. You sent us a bunch of holiday grudges. You sent us holiday grinchiness.

You sent us Happyish Holidays stories and Marcel and Megan and I read them, chatted about them over on our Patreon or Apple Premium. We are an independent podcast.

Maybe someday I’ll make an episode or something or write something about what that means, but what it means is that we’re really just doing this with all of you. So thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting our show.

Thank you for telling people about our show, rating it, reviewing it, and for subscribing and joining us on Patreon and Apple Premium or Apple Plus. Honestly, I don’t know what it’s called and it’s always going to be called something different.

And that’s okay. We’re a production of Feelings & Co. That’s our little independent production company.

What’s our team? It’s Marcel Malekebu and Claire McInerny and Megan Palmer and Michelle Planton and Grace Barry and sometimes Amanda Romani.

We make other shows like the Terrible Reading Club and It’s Going to Be Okay, which is another show, which seems like the opposite of Terrible, Thanks for Asking, but it’s really more of a cousin. My songwriting career is blooming.

Every time I sing a song that I made up off the top of my head, Taylor Swift craps her pants. I know it. I just, I could, what was that sound?

Taylor Swift crapping her pants. Yeah, she did it again. Hard things don’t take a holiday break.