My 11-year-old daughter is running around the house wearing a furry Santa hat because today is the Santa Claus parade and the sight of it is making me seethe.

I hate Xmas.

I hate the trees, I hate the lights, I hate the garlands, I hate the mistletoe, I hate the eggnog, I hate the holly, I hate the fat man and his 9 goddamn reindeer (yeah you heard me, 9), I hate the ornaments, I hate the stockings, I hate the elves, I hate the music, I really hate the carolers, although I haven’t seen any since I was a kid, I hate the fact that we have to do so much traveling to just get through the goddamn holiday, I hate the commercialism, I hate going broke just because I’m “supposed to” and because people buy me shit so I have to do the same (people should just give me stuff, dammit), I hate pictures of children on Santa’s lap, I hate tinsel…I hate Xmas so much that I refuse to even spell it properly. There is only one thing I like about Xmas, but we’ll get to that at the end.

So I guess the big question is, why do I hate Xmas? Well come sit ’round the fire, children, do I have a story for you.

I was 11 and my mom was picking me up from a sleepover at a friend’s house, which was uncharacteristic of her. Also uncharacteristic was the mood she was in. It was a good one. There hadn’t been a good mood in my house for a very long time due to the fact that my mom and step-dad fought nearly every day and were already sleeping in separate beds. Oh, by the way, it was a few weeks before Xmas.

So I asked my mom why she picked me up and she said it was because she was already getting in the truck to go somewhere. “Where?” I asked and she replied playfully, “Xmas shopping, and no you can’t come!”

Well obviously this meant she was going Xmas shopping for gifts for me and when she dropped me off at home, I spent the morning fantasizing about all of the wonderful things my mother was buying for me at that precise moment.

Then my (step-) dad came home and things got awkward because he & I had had a fight the night before. He sat me down in the living room chair while he sat on an ottoman and he explained to me that he and my mom were probably going to split up because, among other things, he suspected my mom was having an affair with Keith, the husband of the husband and wife duo who were their best friends, Keith and Sue. Keith also happened to be my mother’s best friend since grade 8. My dad said he didn’t have any proof that this was happening, but that both he and Sue suspected it and that both he and Sue had been talking about leaving their marriages because of it.

I took this all in stride. I thought about all the nights we spent at Keith and Sue’s house, where my parents would go to play Uno on Saturday nights in the kitchen while I watched their two kids and my brother in the living room. The flirting that I had seen going on between both couples had not been imagined and now my dad was telling me that my mother had acted on it. Truthfully, I wasn’t all that surprised by the revelation and I secretly wondered if my dad hadn’t slept with Sue.

So after this heart to heart with my dad, we hugged and he said that he’d still be my dad no matter what happened (because he was the only dad I knew) and we cried a little bit and then he had to leave to go get my 5-year-old brother who had been spending the weekend with my dad’s sister and her kids in the next town over.

After he left I kind of just sat in the living room chair and absorbed all I’d been told. Then I decided to go to the kitchen to get something to eat. I was halfway through making a sandwich when my dad burst through the back door and told me to get my shit on NOW. I asked why and he said he couldn’t tell me why. But I asked again, as I was getting my coat and boots on and he just said, “I’m going to show you how your mother really is,” and then we got in the car.

In the car he told me that he’d been driving down the road, on his way to get my brother, when he saw my mom’s truck in the middle of the parking lot of a large grocery store and that’s where we were going. I didn’t really understand what he was saying, but we held hands all the way to the grocery store, where we pulled in around the back of the building where we were hidden but could still see my mom’s truck parked all alone. I asked why her truck was there and why it was the only one in the parking lot and my dad just said, “the parking lot was probably full when she left it there”.

The next thing I knew, Sue shows up in her car and my dad flashed his lights at her so she pulled in behind us. My dad told me to get in the backseat, Sue opened the passenger side door, shoved her two kids ages like, 5 and 3, in the backseat with me and that’s when my dad and Sue started talking. And now that I think about it, it wasn’t even talking, it was flat out freaking out. Sue was in a state and I still didn’t really know what the fuck was going on.

So I asked.

One of them, or both of them, explained to me that what we were sitting here waiting to see was if Keith’s truck would pull into the parking lot to drop my mom off at her truck and then it clicked. We were going to catch my mom and Keith having an affair, like concrete proof. This was a showdown.

I was suddenly terrified and all I could do was cry. I was so scared about what was going to happen next that I definitely went into a state of shock.

We waited and waited and waited. It got dark. And then lo & behold, Keith’s truck pulls into the parking lot and parks beside my mom’s truck. Sue yelled to my dad, “Get them Ken! Before she gets out! Go go go!” and my dad hit the gas, placing his car right in front of both my mom and Keith’s.

My mom was in the passenger side of Keith’s truck and she had her hands behind her head and her eyes were closed. Keith leaned over and hit the lock on my mom’s side of the truck and I guess he hit his too because Sue tried to yank open his door to beat the crap out of him but she couldn’t get it open so she resorted to banging her fists on the hood of the truck and screaming at him instead.

My dad just kind of stood there in the parking lot with his hands over his face. I think he was crying. I mean, don’t get me wrong here, their marriage was definitely over by this point, this was just the nail in the coffin, but I still think the reality of it hit him really hard and to this day he’s never recovered.

I was so angry. I walked over to my mom’s side of the truck and I kicked the door as hard as I could and I remember screaming “why?” I kicked the door again. My mother just sat there and didn’t even look at me, she just looked straight ahead, not even a single tear. There were no Xmas presents in the truck, just a napkin on the dashboard from a Marriott hotel.

I don’t remember getting back in my dad’s car but we did, leaving Sue still screaming at Keith while her two little kids stood in the parking lot and screamed too. He started driving toward the town my Aunt lived in and we held hands all the way there, too. We didn’t say much, I mean, what was there to say? I just cried.

When we got to my Aunt’s, where my brother was, I just sat on her couch in a daze while my dad explained to her what had gone down. I don’t really remember if my brother came home with us or if he stayed at my Aunt’s, but my dad and I went home and that night my mother never came home. I don’t know where she stayed. I do know that the next day she went to work and all day she got calls from all of Sue’s friends calling her a homewrecker and every other name in the book. My dad let me stay home from school.

That night my mother did come home and the fighting began. My dad was (obviously) pissed off about the affair, she was pissed off that I was there to witness the evidence. I stayed upstairs in my room, listening at the grate in the floor while they screamed at each other. I remember my dad saying “I’m going to go up there and tell her everything,” and my mom screaming, “oh do you want me to go up there and tell her how you wanted the four of us to fuck on the floor like dogs?” The fighting and screaming lasted all night, I just cried. I don’t think anyone came into my room to see if I was okay because I remember putting myself to sleep.

After that, things were obviously tense in our household. My dad was sleeping with my brother in his bed, like he’d been doing for months, while my mom slept in the “marital bed”. They’d go to work, come home, my mom would lock herself in her room while my dad, my brother and I would eat dinner and watch TV in the living room. The silence was deafening and being kind of a loner kid, I had absolutely no one to talk to about any of this.

For some idiotic reason, my parents decided to try and have “one last Xmas together for the kids” and it was so phony and so strained that I actually liked it better when they were screaming at each other. At least that was honest.

My dad moved out soon after to sleep on my Aunt’s couch. I went to school. My brother went to daycare. My mom opened and closed her store. Dinner was eaten in silence and my life would never be the same.

That’s why I hate Xmas. It was Xmas when my entire world fell apart, things never got better (with each subsequent Xmas my parents made it worse and worse between the announcement of Keith moving in to the yearly fighting about who got us kids when to the blatant use of my brother and I as weapons) it has tainted the holiday for me for the last 19 years and I don’t see my attitude changing any time soon.

There is no moral to this story, there is no lesson. If you see one, please, show it to me, because I’ve been trying to figure it all out for more than half my life.

But that one thing? That one thing that I actually like about Xmas that I promised you would be at the end of this article? Kevin Blood Wilson. Merry fucking Xmas.