Narritive Paper

Matt Feldott

The Worst Holiday Ever

The worst holiday ever started out like any holiday. It was in the winter of 2001. My family and I were getting ready to move into our new house in Yorkville and we knew the time of the season wouldn’t give any good weather. So we had other member of our family and some of our friends helping us move our stuff from one house to another. But let me go back and tell you how this really started to be the worst holiday ever.
It started at thanksgiving with the death of my grandpa. My grandparents had just come home from visiting my aunt in Pennsylvania, when my grandpa had to be admitted into the hospital for kidney failure. We went to visit him for a few days and my dad, my grandma, and my other aunt would take turns going up to the hospital and staying with him. Unfortunately a few days after being admitted into the hospital he died of kidney failure two days before thanksgiving. We had the funeral the day after thanksgiving but it is hard to celebrate the giving of thanks anymore without asking why god took away one of the best family members, who loved thanksgiving.
Now back to December, the month that never ended. We started moving things into our new house on December 14. During the move my cousin and my dad were carrying some furniture upstairs to one of the bedrooms, when my cousin lost his footing and fell back down the stairs from the top. So this halted the moving process so that we could take him to the hospital. My family and I spent a lot of time in the hospital that year. We found out that my cousin had a broken arm and crack ribs from falling down the stairs. Now we were faced with a dilemma, we couldn’t have Christmas at our house like usual because we didn’t have everything moved into the new house yet and my uncle’s house, which we were living in at the time because our original house had been sold and we had to move out of, wasn’t big enough for all the people. What were we to do? Well it wasn’t until about the 20th of the month that we had finally got most of the big furniture moved into the house, with the help of other family members and friends. So we have most of our stuff moved in the house but then we realized something was wrong. When the builders built our house they were in such a hurry they forgot to finish the basement off! We had gravel floors, and garbage galore in our basement. So we had to cover our furniture with sheets and blankets and move back out until the basement could be done.
Now things start to get interesting because we have a house that isn’t done, we are living back at my uncle’s house and no one knows what we are going to do about Christmas this year. We were the only ones in the family that had a big enough house to have it every year. This was the holiday from you know where. Well my aunt, which lives around here, started calling around to places that we could rent out for our Christmas party and at the time it seemed like it would be a good idea. Boy were we wrong. Every place that she called had been booked months before because of the holiday rush. So here we are again no place to have Christmas and our new house still isn’t done because the workers are going on holiday break for a week.
So what to do for Christmas, well we decided that this holiday season wasn’t a good one to start because of what happened at thanksgiving. But wait there’s a gleam of hope on the horizon. One place still had a party room available. YEAH! Christmas after all. So my aunt booked us the room and when we asked her where this was she said a place in Naperville by where she lived. So we wake up on Christmas day and do the present thing with my parents, my uncle and I and then at about noon we are supposed to go over to the place that my aunt got for our party room. The one thing my aunt forgot to mention was that the reason they had this room open so late before Christmas is because there was a wedding that had occurred there about four or five weeks prior to us needed the room. Well at that wedding during one of the dances a little kid fell down and got stepped on by people who were dancing and now we found out the reason why they needed business. The little kid fell down and got stepped on like I said before but after they pick him up he became ill. Then another little kid became ill and then another. Then one of the adults at the wedding became ill and a lot of people at the wedding became ill all over the place. So the building had to go through a massive cleanup effort to get the hall ready for any other parties. They had to revarnish the dance floor, cleaned the carpets about three or four times, and do more cleaning of the room. Ok so they cut the price of the room for us, which was good but my mom still felt as if something was wrong and mother intuition kicked in. We probably should have listened to her when she said something else is wrong. As we are having our family Christmas party, we start to see people showing up that we had never met before. More and more people just kept coming and why couldn’t figure out who these people were or how we are related to them. The reason why we couldn’t figure this out is because they weren’t part of our family. The party had booked two Christmas parties for the same day and didn’t think anyone would notice. So we spent our holiday with a completely strange family. Then a few days after Christmas we found out that our basement had been finished and we could move all the rest of our things into our house.
Now we are coming up on the New Year and my family decided that we would have a family party at our new house to show people the new house and other fun stuff like that. So we planned the party and everyone started coming over and then we had the party. We had about 30 people at our house and 15 of them stayed the night because of the weather and other reasons. All and all we had bad holiday that year but it ended on a good note.