My Antisocial Republican Uncle Can’t Come Home for the Holidays Because He Has to Go to Walmart
It isn’t what you think. My antisocial republican uncle would love to join us for the holidays, but he has to go to Walmart. This upcoming errand is not a result of the recent election and has nothing to do with the fact that it is all my family will be celebrating for the whole week of Christmas break. In lieu of toasting to Stacey Abrams over candied yams, cranberry sauce, lamb chops, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and turkey, he will be perusing the aisles of Walmart, and that’s okay.
I don’t remember what he had to buy, but he had to buy something. And he had to buy it on Christmas day. My aunt told us this when she arrived without him to kick her feet up and celebrate the outcome of the recent election. She would be a few days without him, drinking Moscow mules by the poolside and asking what it’s like to live in Georgia now that it’s a blue state. Do we eat differently? Do we walk differently? What do we have for breakfast now that Georgia voted blue? Maybe scrambled eggs with a side of justice and relief from the racist, Hitleresque dictator that has been patrolling our country for the last four years? Well, whatever it is we’re doing differently, my uncle will not know of, because he will be somewhere else buying whatever he needs to buy from Walmart.
As each relative slowly arrives one by one, they will ask “where is your uncle,” and I will casually say “he’s at Walmart,” and that answer will be good enough for me and good enough for them. There will be no need to provide a detailed explanation of what he is buying and why he needs to buy it on Christmas day, but there may be a long pause and then perhaps a chuckle. Not a hateful chuckle, but almost a chuckle as if to say, there’s always next year. And even if he can’t make it next year, we understand.
There’s always little things that need to be bought here and there, and sometimes people just have to be sacrificed in order to buy them. Maybe he needed to buy one of those one dollar DVDs. You know, the ones that are always stacked in those bins around the holidays. Everybody loves to just crowd around those bins and jam their fingers into those things. Doesn’t anybody get tired of watching Home Alone?
We acknowledge that he is making sacrifices like these on Christmas day, and I would even go as far as saying we applaud him for it. Who is to say that there will be any more leftovers by the time he returns from Walmart, if he even returns at all? God knows we’ll be thinking of him as we’re all digging into our turkey thighs and breasts and making sandwiches with the leftover turkey the day after that. God bless that man for going to Walmart and giving us all more to eat. Well, whatever it was he needed to buy, he obviously had to buy it in the midst of quality family time that only happens once a year when the moon is full, and the tide is high, and that’s okay.
It was okay with my aunt, too, when she came to supposedly defend my republican uncle, but really to celebrate the recent election. This became apparent to us when she started to say “he may be politically incorrect, but,” and then never finished the sentence.
