I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas - Lewis Black [8]
Let me see if I can put it more succinctly: STAY HOME, IDIOTS!
And did these people ever consider what a tropical climate might do to their baby? (A baby that has barely adjusted to the climate of his or her own hometown, I might add.) Have these parents no fear that their pride and joy might contract some sort of inscrutable and incurable skin rash? I know that I’m worried about waking up to find my body covered with red splotches outlined in white with a star in the middle. I don’t know what it might be, but I know it’s serious. If I’m scared, shouldn’t these parents fear for the well-being of their darlings, too?
Of course they should. But they’re too busy sunning themselves near the pool while playing the latest app on their iPhone to realize this.
Some might say I am overreacting, that I am being overprotective of the infant. Bullshit. I’m not. I’m being overprotective of myself. I don’t want babies on my vacation. Besides, it’s Thanksgiving. Shouldn’t they all be at home, where they belong? For God’s sake, it’s the beginning of the holiday season. Where are these families’ family values?
A child needs memories of the family together as Dad slices the turkey, their brothers and sisters arguing spiritedly about who gets the remote control during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, their uncles snoring through the football games as their aunts gossip after dinner. They need to witness the alcohol, the rage, the tears of regret—things that can sink deeply into their barely formed psyches and scar them forever. Otherwise what are they going to talk to their shrink about?
Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. Since my family rarely celebrated our own Thanksgiving, I am nearly bereft of family values of any sort. But that’s a whole other set of problems and a whole other book.
But there are little tics I have because of Thanksgivings I spent with other families when I was growing up. For example, I weep whenever anyone brings out a gravy boat with real gravy. Or I hear angry screams whenever I see a bottle of Old Crow bourbon.
The only good thing one can say about giving a child who can barely speak a Thanksgiving in a tropical resort is that it’s not an Al-Qaeda Thanksgiving. There’s no chance the kids will ask, “Daddy, why is the turkey ticking?”
When the children aren’t going off half-cocked outdoors, they are going off half-cocked indoors. I sadly learn there is no separate dining room for them. From the breakfast buffet to fine dining at dinner, the kids are flittering around the place, or staring blankly at their portobello mushroom quiches with Gruyère and crab just before they burst into tears and begin shrieking that they hate it. They even have their own breakfast buffet line where they can be assured of mainlining enough sugar to keep them rocketing through space till the sun goes down.
Even though I hate to swim, I tried going to the adult pool to escape the madness and calm my nerves. Unfortunately, I discovered that the adult pool was much smaller than the main pool, and that only fueled my rage. Is this a joke? As a kid, I always got the fucking small pool, the wading pool in the backyard. And now as an adult I still get the small pool, while the kids get the big pool.
WHY, THOSE LITTLE FUCKERS, IT’S JUST NOT RIGHT!
To me, this hotel has to be a place for adults and maybe, just maybe—and very grudgingly—teenagers. But children? NOOOOOOOO! It’s for romantic getaways, or to just get away from it all. And the “all” in “getting away from it all” definitely includes children, who, I REPEAT, don’t need to get away from anything.