My presence was required at a Christmas fete.

I’d never go anywhere or do anything if people didn’t make me. But I can be treed, and rounded up, if you try hard enough. My wife went too of course, and we enjoy each other’s company more than any other. Funny that.

Everyone was in a great mood. That’s rarer than you might think at a party. People attend such things for a multitude of reasons, not all based on the enjoyment of the thing.

God, I remember the dreadful Christmas parties I attended when I was in the corporate setting. The Bataan Christmas March was more like it. I get to stay late at work and socialize with people I’d like to kill with my bare hands over something that happened last Tuesday? Great. I’d get to have employees marching up to me and wishing me Merry Christmas aloud and wishing I was being eaten by a band of cannibal elves under their breath, because they only got a seven percent raise, and knew in their heart of hearts they deserved seventy, because they only sleep at their desk one day out of five — not like those lazy people in the next cubicle. Then about twenty five percent of the attendees would whisper to each other the location of a local hellhole bar and we’d meet there and have a blast.

There was none of that last night. Everyone was there because they wanted to be there. And after the party, the host invited everybody over to his house and everybody went there too, and just kept going.

I started exhausted, and came home the same. But it was a different kind of exhaustion. I had exhausted all the possibilities of conviviality, and slept like a child on Christmas night.

Thanks for making me leave the house Steve.