WHAT’S SO FUNNY: Deck the halls and duck

Last weekend I went to Denver to visit my sister, and we got to reminiscing about the Christmases we had at home in Illinois.

Each family member has a few unique memories to go with the shared ones, and Isabel remembered a couple things I’d forgotten.

Decorating the tree, for instance. Since childhood my recollection of this ritual has been associated with tedium, but I’d forgotten why until Isabel reminded me that Mom always insisted we string the tinsel on the branches one strand at a time.

“I used to go around in back and just throw a handful on,” she said.

She also recalled the time our cocker spaniel, Tippy, got up on the dining room table and ate the skin off the Christmas turkey, for which I was blamed because everyone knew I was partial to the skin.

That story reminded us both of the most striking thing about our Christmas dinner, which was that we almost never sat down and ate it. That’s the major memory that Isabel and I share — the annual Christmas meltdown.

Much is made of what a blessing it is to have the family together under one roof for the yuletide holidays, and to judge by the expressions in the Christmas card photos we get in the mail every year, it must be. The Kiralys of the early ’60s always intended to have a Christmas similar to those pictured, but we always wound up with a rip in the family photo.

In our family, proximity was more of a threat than a blessing, and while Christmas Eve through Christmas Day doesn’t seem like that long a time to be together, it was a bit longer than our Dad could usually tolerate.

Dad had a tendency to get gradually out of sorts on occasions of good cheer. By late afternoon of Christmas Day he was invariably moody, and some time before dinner he would erupt and blow us all to our separate corners of the house, where we kept our heads down until we heard snoring. This left the turkey as the only party present at the table, and that’s how Tippy made his big score.

Dad’s gone now, but I look back on him with some gratitude. He put electric lights in Isabel’s dollhouse and he bought and assembled my Lionel train, and he taught both of us the meaning of the season, which I will now pass on to you:

When your family spends the holidays all together under one roof, and that roof doesn’t actually come off, pardner, that’s a merry Christmas.

SHERWOOD KIRALY is a Laguna Beach resident. He has written four novels, three of which were critically acclaimed. His novel, “Diminished Capacity,” is now available in bookstores, and the film version will soon be out on DVD.