How I Recovered From A Traumatic Xmas Memory

I Am My Own Goddamn Santa Claus

One disastrous Christmas years ago, after I was up half the night wrapping presents for everyone, I woke up to find that there was nothing in my stocking.

NOTHING.

Apparently, mine was supposed to be the only magically self-filling stocking in the house, and it had an epic malfunction on Xmas Eve.

It’s not like stockings were a new tradition in our family, that I am a minimalist, or that I have no interests and am impossible to shop for.

I would have been happy with a lump of coal.

Better to be remembered for being “naughty” than not at all.

That should have been a tip-off that some personal growth was called for, never mind overhauling family system dynamics.

That would come later.

Just a long-winded way to say that ever since that stocking fiasco I buy myself stocking stuffers whenever I damn well feel like it and then I pass them along to delight others.

I bought these kooky beaded spiders (christened Bollywood and Sir Galactic) at a local tattoo and piercing parlor I visited with a friend getting a nose stud changed out for a nose ring.

I guess this was my way of overcoming my FOMO.

The spiders were made by the store owner and her mother. This got me thinking about intergenerational bonds and tattoos. My grandmother, who was born in the late 19th century, had tattoos.

Tattoos are an important part of Okinawan culture, but the Japanese outlawed them when they colonized Okinawa. The Japanese aversion to tattoos is a long story, but the colonizer’s toolbox used to break the will of the colonized is a well-known one.

But my grandma was a rebel and got tattooed anyway.

They were discreet dots on the knuckles, but still…RESPECT. I may need to get the same tattoos in solidarity, to honor her memory.