“No. I got new ones,” I say, using every ounce of my bodily strength to hold the tree in position while Mama crawls underneath it to fiddle with the stand. “God, why are we doing this again?”

From under the cover of green spiky boughs, Mama snaps, “Shuddup, ya Grinch. It’s Christmas.”

Mama hates Christmas. She especially detested the years it was her turn to host the pack of nuts and delinquents she calls a family in our tiny trailer. But back in the day, the Fortune Family Christmas Eve party was one of the highlights of my year. You never knew for sure how the night would go down, but you could always count on a few things: Uncle Ernie would get out a guitar and play old rock and roll tunes that Peggy would butcher, lyrically and melodically, until I joined in and set her straight. Uncle Mossy would “accidentally” trip and fall on my pile of presents, ripping the wrapping enough so that I just had to open them, right then and there. Mama would make double batches of broc-o-glop and chocolate almond crack. Aunt Audrey would get loaded off the smell of the wine cork and end up flat on her uptight arse in the middle of the driveway by ten o’clock. Uncle Gord would leave a bottle of something unattended somewhere, and Mitch and I would sneak a few sips.

Mama and her siblings — the remaining alive and functional ones — would sit around telling stories about themselves, about each other, about the ones who were crazy or dead. Sometimes one of them would whisper about Black Bernie, and muse about the curse on his bloodline because of his mother’s rumoured sins and sorcery. Did old Black Agnes really read tea leaves and brew pennyroyal for pregnant Catholic girls? Did her people really ride out the Irish famines by playing mad and being sent to the bedlam? Did she really tell Black Bernie what she was up to the night she burned her own house and children to the ground? Eventually, those hushed conversations always shifted to a group gush about what a saint their mother had been, even though everybody in Town knew that Lucy Fortune had named all her children after characters in bodice ripper novels, like the worst kind of Catholic sinner. They’d laugh together about pit boots and payday drunks, and being beaten by the nuns for having dirty fingernails and unholy names.

Before the night was through, somebody would get in a fight. The fight was the most reliable of all Fortune Family Christmas Eve traditions, the only one that Mama and I managed to carry on with any degree of consistency when she’d come see me in Toronto. But we only ever fought about stupid, nitpicky mother-daughter things, like how much money I pissed away, or what took Dave so long to propose, or why I wouldn’t even entertain the idea of getting married out in Mama’s backyard like she always dreamed I would, let alone come for a visit once in a blue moon. It was never as much fun as when the whole family was together.