Christmas: The time for hard questions

Christmas is about over indulgence and over familiarity. A time when those who have known you the longest come back into your life and try and update the knowledge they had on you from the last time you met. What this in turn means is that this is a time of year when all the aspects of your life are placed under a microscope and those portions of your life you jealously guarded are ransacked.

Being at the bottom of the generational ladder is often subjected to the hard questions. “Why are you single?” “When are you graduating?” “Where are you working?” “Why have you gained weight?” “When are you moving back home?” “Why do your kids behave that way?”

Breaking bread means breaking social norms and conventions and generally just imposing one’s self on those who fall below you in the family ranks. It is only once that you become a matriarch/patriarch, and the dissection of one’s life ceases. Until then being at the bottom of the generational ladder means fending off enquires with snippets of information that you hope will appease (but in fact, lead to more questions).

As one of those considered “one of the strange ones” I have often met the questions with ridiculous answers (especially the “who are you dating” one) and have been glad to report great success. The cloak of being the odd sheep in the family has saved me a great number of uncomfortable conversations about the path my life has taken. In some respects I have done well, in others I am so far off the path it is but a thin line in the distance.
I have even managed to deter aunts from attempting to set me up with “boys from good families” as they fear that I may come off a little too quirky. Having finally graduated I can now safely elude the “professional student” comments, however there is still the rest of the minefield that one has to tread carefully to avoid.

Thus my advice would be to answer the hard questions with the hard answers. The more insane the answer the better. When asked why you lost your job say that it was because the boss was jealous because you were Steve Jobs and he was Tim Cook (the other apple guy no one knows). When the status of your “pending” graduation is brought up simply state that you are taking the idea of the “school of life” more seriously than your peers.
When questioned about who you are seeing and do not want to say, simply say that you have risen above the need for emotional and physical intimacy with lesser homo sapiens, thus you shall be single until humanity as whole is simply, better. If someone queries your Body Mass Index try something along the lines of “I am smuggling food for starving children in various needy communities under my skin.”

All these answers must be given with a straight face and one must look the person dead in the eye. Never breaking eye contact.

These questions can only be repelled with the same force with which they come. Family are there to make you take a good hard long look at your life in the way that New Years resolutions, near death experiences and a mid life crisis can never do. They make you question everything that you are and it takes Spartan endurance to come out saying “yes, this is (somewhat) the idea I envisioned for my life and I am (75% to 82%) happy with it.”

And even though they may drive you insane, always remember that blood is thicker than water. But then again oil is thicker than blood so if they are questioning your love of an oil baron then they can all go take a hike. At the end of the day it was lovely seeing them and it all comes to an end and you can go back to that carefully constructed life you will spend all year perfecting, before it is taken apart again.

Merry Christmas and a Happy Inquisition.