Boxing Day has its many traditions from passing presents to watching the football.
For many years ours has been to see my mother’s side of the family. Each year, on rotation, we all decamp to whomever has been tagged as host for the year. Aunt J was this year’s hostess and so the Beynon clan descended en masse.
We’re nine with partners, if you throw in my mum’s siblings that takes it to thirteen, sprinkle in their husbands and wives you’ve got seventeen, then add children…you’ll get to twenty-two easily, they’re all grown and so kids partners takes it up a few to twenty-four. My great aunt and uncle put in a show, topping it off at twenty-six.
That’s just fairly immediate family. I wasn’t kidding: I really am related to half of Wales.
There was beer, banter, food, a tremendous trifle, reminiscing and a movie music quiz (G and I were triumphant, not that I’m bragging). It was great.
Anyway, these things are tremendous fun and also a little off the wall. For years my mother led me, in a cunning plan of subterfuge and deception, to believe the chaos was because there were so many children there. Given my mum and siblings between them have nearly enough for a whole football team this seemed a logical explanation.
Not a stretch.
It’s still a mad event and with the youngest of us now seventeen this plausible explanation just doesn’t fly. And I’ve worked out what I suspect my father and uncles knew all the long.
It’s the sisters three: Mum, J and SJ.
The proof is burned in the retina of my mind for all time:
My mother, SJ and J belly dancing across my aunt’s living room foisting turkish delight (the chocolate – get your mind out of the gutter) on anyone who was passing. I would have posted a picture of the spectacle but alas I have been warned, and, quite frankly, I don’t think wearing my genitalia on my ears would really be practical.
Now if you’ll excuse me my therapist is on the other line…
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