A SWEDISH CHRISTMAS
Stockholm is the perfect city to spend Christmas: the snow, the beautiful atmosphere and the family to celebrate your holidays with. Of course I‟m not talking about my family. My family is a group of crazy people.
I had planned to spend Christmas with my Swedish family: my step-sister Isabella, her boyfriend David, her step-brother Jackson and her mother Clarissa. My mother, Susanne, insisted to come with me. It‟s important to say that Clarissa and my mother have always hated each other. Between my sister and me things were not that bad, except that she had just delivered a very ugly baby and I did hate ugly babies. David was a good guy, but when he drank too much he started singing and
dancing Backstreet Boys „ songs which was not a very cool show for us.
On top of it my father, who lived in India, decided to join us.
My mother hated my father, Clarissa hated my father, my sister was very close to hating him too and I was not quite sure yet, but I was considering it. To start with, my father had booked his return ticket to India on the 24th, overlooking the fact that it was actually Christmas Eve, the day he was
supposed to celebrate with us. That‟s why our Christmas Eve started quite early in the morning, shut up in a two-room flat with our so-called family, actually perfectly unknown people. No escape: it was deeply freezing outside with a snow tempest and killer-stalactites falling down from the roofs.
My mother, who had always hated Christmas and the snow, was in a very bad mood. My sister, who had always loved Christmas, really didn‟t understand why my mother hated it so much. David, who had already drank a lot, was trying to entertain everybody with some Christmas songs.
Swedish cuisine is famous for being one of the less memorable cuisine in the world. For the Christmas Eve Clarissa cooked for us some typical Swedish food.
First dish: herring. Second dish: herring. Third dish: herring. Dessert: herring.
My mother, a very poshy and classy French woman, started to complain with me about the food Clarissa had prepared. In that moment she fell down and broke two fingers of her hand. Bad Karma.
My father, a drug-addict with serious problems of manic-depression, was telling me about his new project called “Save the World With 1 Euro” and about the fact that Obama wanted to give him the Nobel prize he had received last year. Of course my father didn‟t accept it. He also told me that one day per week Gandhi and Martin Luther King came into his room to give him good advice on how to abolish poverty and violence in the world.
He didn‟t tell me, but I immediately understood that this was the last time we would see him. He had spent most of his life in Sweden, a country he hated, and seemed very happy to live in India.
Jackson was very disappointed because his father was not there with us so he started crying and screaming like a baby. His father, Carl, and Clarissa, had divorced three months before and Jackson was really upset for that. He had also been recovered in a psychiatric hospital because he had tried to commit suicide.
I told you my family is definitely crazy.
My father left in the afternoon, my mother was crying because of her two broken fingers, Clarissa was trying to comfort Jackson, David was singing while my sister was trying to shut him up. I was sitting on the sofa, looking at that weird situation, but I was smiling and I was feeling good. Better to have a crazy family instead of a boring one.
