"The YouTube Christmas" by Ashley Cafasso

Ever since I could remember, my grandmother always wanted the whole family together for Thanksgiving and Christmas. When she passed, my family decided to split the Holidays. One year Thanksgiving would be at my Aunt’s house and Christmas at ours. The next year we would switch and we would have Thanksgiving at our house and Christmas at theirs. Last year was a Christmas I won’t forget.

My cousin Nick had moved to Hawaii, no one had seen him in person for a few years. He had moved there with his fiancée, and he had started his own photography business. However last Christmas he surprised everyone by showing up on my Aunt’s front porch. It nearly gave her a heart attack

The conversation at the dinner table started with my mother going into a full-blown description of my brothers embracing 21st birthday in Los Vegas, and how he and his friends had gotten into trouble at a strip club. My mother loved to tell embarrassing story’s and every time she got the chance she would go into full detail about how my brother took rum shots or how he would stager when he tried to walk after each bar. My brother ignored the whole conversation because he mostly had no memory of the drunken time in Vegas.

As everyone started to eat and talk about their recent adventures at the dinner table something went terrible wrong at the head of the table. My mother and my uncle got into an argument about who can drink more. Soon my mother was trying to down a whole bottle of champing as so was my uncle, to see who could down the bitter drinks faster. Soon my older brother and younger cousin got into the argument. They stared to bet on who would down a bottle of champing fastest, my mother, or uncle. Soon all three of the bottles of champing had disappeared. As a result, the argument turned to who hadn’t drank and who was going to go buy more booze. I saw my cousin; Nick had escaped the drunken fest upstairs and I soon followed.

He went up to my grandmother’s old study where he was watching something online. Of course, he was surfing the popular website, YouTube. He was watching the annoying orange Christmas The annoying orange is a normal orange that has been photo-shopped to look like it has a mouth and eyes. He says sassy things and is, well annoying as a two year old. He is immature and usually makes farting noise from its unrealistic mouth.

When I sat down and watched it, I did not find the fart noises and annoying comments that the talking orange was making, funny at all. But, my cousin was cracking up. He was laughing so hard that I’m sure you could hear him down the street. When the small clip was over I showed him what I thought was funny, Charlie the Unicorn. Charlie the Unicorn is a poorly drawn animation show of three unicorns doing crazy things such as climbing erupting volcanoes. Usually at the end Charlie (the main unicorn) losses something important, such as his kidney and he can’t remember how he lost it. He was surprised that I knew what that was. Apparently, Charlie the Unicorn use to be popular when he was in high school. I realized that even thought my cousin was much older than I was he still had a child-like aura to him that made him fun to be around and even relatable.

However, I also realized he was a boy and boy’s ideas of funny are much different from girls. This was shown when we watched another YouTube video that I chose, Fred. Fred is a normal teenager around the age of 16. However, Fred has A.D.H.D and the actor who plays Fred pretends he is about the age of 12. The actor of Fred edits the videos and gives Fred a high-pitched voice. The video that we watched was about Fred swimming. He first describes is obsession for Judy, his neighbor and then goes into a kiddy pool, one that you can find in a toy store and splashes around like a lunatic. What makes the videos funny is the use of slow motion and voice-overs. I found the clip amusing while my cousin thought the annoying orange was better.

After we had watched about an hour of YouTube videos and the adults where done trying to get drunk, we where called back downstairs to start opening presents. Nick brought chocolates of all sorts for my parents, pornographic calendars for my older brother, kitchen items for my Aunt, Uncle, and grandfather, toys for all kids under the age of 12, and a Hawaii calenderer for me. He also brought the sprit of Christmas with him by being there for Christmas and spending time with everyone.

What I realized that year was that my mother was wrong. She would always tell me how my grandmother brought this family together, how she was our glue. When she kicked the bucket, everything had been lost. But mom was wrong because our family can still get along., No matter how much we may bitch and moan about each other we are still family. My cousin that year was our glue.