It's been a week and a half since the awful food poisoning experience, and I am still feeling 'not quite right.' I have a suspicion that it isn't entirely physical... I haven't been a big fan of 'The Holidays' since the first Christmas after my parents divorced. I was 10 and my mother said "You don't believe in Santa Claus anymore, so help me set up your sister's presents!" She didn't wait long to hit me with the 'grown-up' stick. Her Christmas was ruined so she'd be damned is she wasn't going to drag me into her divorcee hell and make me play the little adult.

Actually Christmas took a hit a few years earlier when my sister and I (maybe age 4 and 8?) woke up very early and--little demon-spawn that we were--went down and (god forbid) opened our presents. Our visiting grandmother woke and came down to watch. When our parents woke up and found us my mother was livid. The main reason for her anger? We hadn't kept the wrappings with the gifts so we wouldn't know who gave us what for thank-you note writing. Considering that it wouldn't have been THAT hard to match wrapping with boxes, one suspects that there was some other reason for the simmering rage she managed to maintain the entire day.

Things pretty much went downhill from there. Every year increasingly became an event where we were just going through the motions. So I haven't been back to Bethel Park in at least a dozen years.