Part 1: Sisters
Brittany and Scott finally made it over for a visit in mid-December, although it wasn’t smooth sailing by any stretch of the imagination. Mom sent me a text message the night before they were due to arrive and said that their plane had suffered technical problems and was being delayed by 24 hours. I was highly annoyed, not just because they were only planning on coming for a few days and it was going to mean I’d get to spend less time with them, but also because I had missed the Which? office Christmas party that Friday night because I had to get up early the next day to meet them at the airport. I’m sure I didn’t miss much, but having the opportunity to see your co-workers drunk and acting a fool is just not something I ever had the chance to do when I was working for Siemens in Orlando.
It wasn’t quite as bad as it could’ve been; they managed to squeeze onto a flight from Orlando to Manchester and the airline was to provide a coach to drive them down to Gatwick Airport in London. Never mind that the bus took AGES and I had to wait at the airport alone for almost 2 hours, they finally made it! It was such a nice feeling to have family with me again. They both looked completely exhausted, but excited to be in London for the first time. I wanted to take them everywhere and show them everything right then and there, but I restrained myself and took them back to my place (not an easy journey with all that luggage and the stairs at all the stations). We had a really fun few days while they were here. Kelly and I took them to Ealing Broadway to get Scott a nice “British” shirt to wear one night. We practically begged him to get a decently tight pair of jeans, but he resisted till the end and stuck to his baggy ones despite our best efforts to smarten him up a bit. I have to say, you would be hard-pressed to find worse-dressed people than the British past the age of, say, 50, but you have to give it to young British men…they know how to dress, and they look good (particularly mine). I had to work one day, but I was able to take a few vacation days to go sightseeing with them, which was really fun. We went shopping on Oxford Street, to the London Dungeon, Harrods, Portobello Road—all over the place really. When we were at Portobello Road we stopped off at a pub so Britt and Scott could experience a Sunday roast dinner, and so they could meet my boyfriend for the first time. Kevin was going to meet up and have lunch with us. It was so weird sitting in the pub waiting for him to walk in. I haven’t really dated anyone since I broke up with my last serious boyfriend over 4 years ago, so this was the first time I would introduce a guy to my family in about 6 years. I was really pretty excited about it. I sorta kinda saw a guy when I was studying in Northampton during college, but nobody in my family ever met him and I always harbored a fear that everyone thought I was making him up so as to not look quite so pathetic. Now I finally had living, breathing evidence that I’m neither a complete loser nor an inventor of fake boyfriends. It was more than a little gratifying, too, when after Kevin came and had made introductions and gone to order food with Scott, Britt leaned across the table and said, “He’s hot!” The time Britt and Scott were here went by way too quickly. We had a nice pre-Christmas dinner on their last night, and Kevin and Kelly were here to pull Christmas crackers with us—another Christmas first for me. I’d never done Christmas crackers before, and I initially thought they were something you eat with a cheese ball or the like, but it turns out that they are decorated bits of thin cardboard shaped kind of like a giant Tootsie roll and filled with a paper crown, a surprise, and a motto/joke. I looked all over for some really good ones to buy, seeing as how they would be a first for everyone present apart from Kevin, which proved difficult at my local ASDA (UK’s version of Wal-Mart, except cleaner, less of a selection, and not filled with half-naked rednecks with monosyllabic names). All the ones I found were cheap, with stupid surprises inside like nail clippers, plastic whistles, key chains, and mini-flashlights. Not what I would call particularly exciting stuff. I finally found something really cute though, and got some that had little wind-up reindeer that run around all over the place. They turned out to be really fun—the box flipped over to show a race course, and the reindeer all had different speeds so that they could race each other. So after dinner we spent the evening racing plastic reindeer. It was good, silly fun. Afterwards we exchanged presents with each other, where Britt completely outdid herself by giving me a mountain of presents bought with her hard-earned money from fitting shoes for sweaty, snaggle-toothed construction workers. What a sweetheart! That night was so much fun, and the perfect end for my mini family Christmas. The next day they left early to get to the airport and I was back at work. It was weird having them gone. It was funny how natural it seemed to have them here and how it felt like we hadn’t been apart for long at all, and when they were gone it felt so empty around the house, and not just because there was room to move around the living room without the mountain of clothes and souvenirs that had been vomited out of my sister’s suitcase. I missed them both.
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