Maybe it's naive, but everytime I go home, I imagine that maybe by now we're all grown enough to get along. This year, that little fantasy got shredded pretty quickly. Maybe that's good. Whatever. We're all frikkin emotional chess grandmasters, my parents and sister and I. It's arguably better than real chess, because you never have to suffer the humiliation of surrendering a game. It's kind of a neverending thing.
Ideally we'd have a really cool family dojo, with lanterns, and bamboo, and zen fountains, and swooshing silk curtains, and like this wicked cool wall full of weapons, and for the first few days of xmas, we'd hang out there, sharpening blades, and retying grips, and stabbing dummies, and practising all these cool moves. It'd be nice if there was some evil xmas orc horde that we could unite against, but ever since Frodo cast the Ring into the crack of Doom, Evil just ain't what it used to be.
So instead, we just turn on each other. I made the mistake of trying to make a tomato salad for myself, the first evening. Here's the recipe:
