Don’t you just hate it when a really good song is ruined by nasty language? Or when a pizza is ruined by that ONE terrible topping? Funny, how easy it is for a little thing to ruin a big thing.

I should make that a children’s book. But in the meantime, I need to find a fix for this sticky situation of having the whole family under one roof and Aunt Mabel gumming up the works. She HATES Christmas, so whatever has changed in the meantime, I simply don’t know. She spent the entirety of her last Christmas visit sitting by the window, saying that our geraniums needed pruning and that really needed to call the tree removal people on the weeping birch because it was ‘tilting’. After two hours of this, I think I was the one who was tilting…

And who shows up on boxing day? The Ashwood tree removal people, of course. Mabel must’ve snuck up to her room and called, telling them it was a ‘dire case’. There was nothing wrong with that birch tree. It was tilting because it’s a weeping birch and that’s what it does!

Oh, and then there was a few years before, when Mabel hadn’t quite decided whether she just hated Christmas or whether it was just a phase. I wasn’t even a teenager at the time, but brought her own gardening tools and spent the whole day outside, grumbling at how Mum had let the place turn into a tip and how ashamed she should be having the entire family here at Christmas, looking at this terrible garden.

Apparently she didn’t have her lightning-fast Melbourne tree trimming people on call that year, otherwise I feel like they would’ve been at the door. And now I’m paranoid about how our garden looks for when Mabel comes along and starts judging every aspect. I should just…close the curtains for the entirety of Christmas.

-Abigail