If the Fates Allow Pa Rum Pum Pum Pum (pt. 2)

Other than the 3-hour choir practice two nights ago, the last time I was in St. Anthony’s Cathedral was 2 months ago at my grandmother’s funeral.

As I enter the church an hour before a fraction of the Rellihan clan takes the Christmas Eve Mass choir by storm, a solemnity comes over me. It is this solemnity, which I'm convinced has everything to do with knowing my grandmother would rejoice in some of her children and their children singing traditional Christmas hymns in her own parish, that gives me the fortitude to once again sing in the choir, a new tradition (so I'm told) that began last year to honor my Aunt Becky's Christmas Eve birthday.

As we prepare to practice, Aunt Becky nonchalantly recaps a visit to the gynecologist with two of her granddaughters in tow, there being no one available to babysit them.

While my aunt is spread-eagle in stirrups, a 6-year-old Theresa innocently inquires, “What are they looking at, Grandma?”

My aunt explains to her granddaughter that they are “looking inside me where babies come from, then scraping my uterus to make sure I don’t have cancer.”

I am wide-eyed and wondering what my 2-year-old little cousin Anne Marie was experiencing as my aunt is prostrate on a doctor's table. Aunt Janice is laughing so hard she can barely breathe, and my other aunts are also dying as they listen to their sister-in-law tell all.

As I follow the unfolding narrative of Beck's gynecology appointment, I realize that my family is definitely the origin of and reason for my own unedited and non-filtered candor.

Though Aunt Becky married into the Rellihan Clan, she embodies the raw reality from which all of us in the family experience and express life. It’s refreshingly natural to hear her speak so candidly, until I look over at our choir director (not a member of our family) and am reminded by the look on her face that this is not the typical conversation in a sanctuary only a few feet from the Blessed Sacrament. I smile and revel in the realness of it all, until I look down and see that Aunt Becky is carrying an old hat box that I presume she plans to use as the drum in our a cappella rendition of The Little Drummer Boy.  Oh boy.

I exit the hilarity and walk to the organ to remind Mike to please begin O, Holy Night a key and a half below the soprano version he relentlessly attempted to play during practice. My family is a clan of altos, and I am leading the song by singing the initial verse solo. The times during practice when Mike has accidentally begun the song too high have been humorous at best, and downright awful at worst. I lovingly caution Mike that I will haunt him in his sleep like the ghosts terrorizing Ebenezer Scrooge if he plays the song too high, and he smiles affirmingly from behind his too-straight-to-be-real set of dentures. I feel I've effectively made my point.

Our choir's pre-Mass multi-song serenade begins with "Mary, Did You Know?"– a Mark Lowry and Buddy Greene song popularized by Kenny Rogers and Wynonna Judd that asks whether the Blessed Mother knew she was carrying the Son of Man. The most confusing Christmas song of the entire season, if you ask me. Its melodic bafflement is sung by our choir director and her brother, and their off-key duet likely sets the course for the rest of the Mass's musical follies. As the choir director saunters down the main aisle (a processional move as confusing as the song itself), Julie and I revert back to childhood when we used to get in trouble for our pew-shaking laughter during Mass, doing our best in this moment not to guffaw out loud as we both wonder why the heck we said yes to this again, and hoping, like last year, that the church's electricity will suddenly fail.

Then comes my solo.

Despite my conscientious reminders to organist Mike, as well as an overtly obvious note written on his sheet music with colored pen, the first organ notes of “O, Holy Night” ring out an octave higher than I am capable of reaching. A resounding “Fuuuck!” rushes through my mind, and I have to look up from my music stand to make certain that I have not actually said it out loud.

“Oh my god.  I’m screwed!” I think to myself.

As Mike ends the excessively high introduction , I open my mouth in a quixotic attempt to reach the oncoming, unreachable notes. I reach them, but I sound like a screeching chipmunk. As I hear my own strained voice, I am faced with the choice of either continuing to muddle through this train wreck until the rest of the choir steps in and possibly saves me at the chorus, or heaving my water bottle into Mike’s toupee’d forehead. I opt to keep up my Christmas spirit and complete the song, despite the fact that this forced vocal range is ripping my larynx.

As the song comes to a close, I am so disappointed– mad, frankly–that I turn off the mic my sister and I share. I lean over to confess my pissy antics to Julie, and she grabs my arm and whispers in relief,  “Thank you, sis.  Now I don’t have to lip sync anymore.” We giggle like little girls as I point to Aunt Becky’s hat box drum.

When I was growing up, St. Anthony's Parish (formerly Assumption) was a congregation of Irish and Italian families. Today, a Vietnamese flock graces daily and weekend Masses. To honor the presence of the fewer than a dozen Vietnamese men and women peppered throughout the otherwise Caucasian Christmas Eve Mass congregation, the liturgical committee decides to include readings in Vietnamese. The throaty clicks and single-syllable word cadence strike a chord with me and Julie, and we continue our feeble attempts to muffle our body-convulsing laughter. We are suddenly 6 years old again, and when the very Caucasian Fr. Turner begins the consecration of the bread and wine in his broken Vietnamese, we both fall forward in our chairs and breathlessly whisper, "Oh Dear God!  Please make it stop!"  Thank goodness I have on black tights beneath my knit dress, because I pee myself a tiny bit.

We survive our second annual Christmas Eve family choir fiasco, even receiving sincere applause and compliments. I begin looking for their hearing aids, but keep smiling as they come in droves to acknowledge us for making the Mass "so beautiful." When I look over at Dad in the third pew, he smiles and winks at me. I know he gets how much I would rather be deflecting these compliments after my less-than-perfect solo moment, but still I smile and accept the handshakes and hugs of people who apparently don't find the sound of screeching chipmunks to be all that off-putting. I smile back at Dad, make a fist, point it at Mike and power punch the air. Dad chuckles, and I feel content and happy, having fulfilled my aunt's birthday wishes and contributed to yet another fine family Christmas moment. Admittedly, however, I am fighting my urge to walk over to Mike and punch him in the throat.

Next up? Meat pie mania– the one day a year that the vegetarians in our family set aside their commitment to sustainable and healthy eating. Despite the fact that each of the 350 homemade pies is chock full of beef, lamb and pork, my own vegan sister, when asked by outsiders how she can abandon her principle of not killing animals for consumption, states (with undeniable conviction) "Because meat pies are not meat.  They are tradition." Well said, little sister.

Aunt Becky and Uncle Steve now host our 68-person gathering every Christmas. They inherited this honor after the family grew too large to manage comfortably in our grandparents' 150-year-old home. We do our best not to discuss the few years that we rented the church basement to house our oversized clan (mostly we don't talk about it because it makes us eldest grandchildren curse a lot), and instead revel in the fact that we now comfortably convene every Christmas Eve in a house with three living rooms and five Christmas trees.

The flat-screen television in the main living room is playing old home movies that have been converted from film to digital. The movies are a blend of bite-our-lips adorable (and our tongues– a genetic indicator that we are in fact Rellihans), and side-splitting hilarious. The clips from these old family movies span the childhood of Mom and her seven siblings, from May crownings all the way to prom, and ultimately their weddings and the start of their own families. A clip of my then shy size-zero mother, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Mary Tyler Moore, evokes cat calls and applause, while footage of Aunt Jeanne prancing shamelessly in front of the lens induces additional hoots and hollers.

Our hysterically funny cousin gift exchange is periodically interrupted by "hey look," and all of our attention focuses on some Rellihan event being memorialized in on-screen pixels.

We collectively, and nearly simultaneously, declare that Grandpa Rellihan looks just like the retired adventurer Carl Fredricksen in the Disney movie Up. We all miss our grandfather's gentle spirit and contagious laughter. I also miss his "Indian burns," his wisdom, and the twenty dollar bills he would secretly slip into my hand every time he kissed and hugged me goodbye.

The day after Christmas, while Mom and Dad are at home, feverish and hunkered beneath comforters, my aunts and uncles, my sister and two of my cousins decide to tackle the insurmountable task of organizing Grandma and Grandpa's house-of-endless-rooms. We begin going through all of my grandparent’s things.

Like Cousin Eddie in Christmas Vacation, we make a point to acknowledge the "good quality items" that Grandma and Grandpa have acquired over the years, most of which (other than the truly fine quality items and the sentimental things) make it into a trash bag or a box destined for Goodwill. About halfway through the day, and after consecutive shrieks of terror, we decide there is absolutely no sentimental value nor reason for keeping the cup containing Grandma and Grandpa's teeth. We do, however, find it strangely imperative to keep the likes of this scary gray-haired, filthy doll.  ???

My precious grandmother kept every card and letter her eight children and all her grandchildren had ever written to her, which leave us deciding the fate of an ungodly number of boxes.

I scour a few of the boxes in attempt to find the letter I wrote to my grandparents after fully disclosing my sexuality, only to come across two of my other heartfelt letters that spoke about how grateful I was to be born into such a close and wonderful family. That was a common theme of the grandkids' cards and letters, and it caused me to reflect on all the times my own father would at family gatherings acknowledge the fact that if it wasn't for "Mom Rellihan," none of us would be here– an acknowledgment that made my grandmother beam with pride.

I've wondered over the years if Gram ever looked around at our oversized family and wondered what the hell she and my grandfather were thinking having all those kids. Whether or not she ever second-guessed her life, I know her family was the pride of her existence, and rightfully so. Even though I'm a tad biased, I can't think of a group of people with whom I would rather be stranded on an island, closing out the final days of my life, or cleaning out a dust-ridden relic of a house.

As we engage in the final days of Christmas 2014, I want to personally wish everyone reading this day-in-the-life blog a beautiful new 2015 year. Life truly is what we make of it, and I wish for you a life of your own making, filled with moments that make you pause in gratitude, take your breath away and make you laugh so hard that you pee in your pants a little.