Update your files. The man has been dead for two and a half years. Stop calling to ask for him.

Sincerely,

His rather annoyed daughter.

2004 brutalized me. And the irony of that statement is that the brutality of that year had nothing to do with Bush getting re-elected. I know a lot of people struggled with that but I was struggling with some things infinitely more important to me than him. I survived and the majority of my family did, too. This year on Christmas Eve, my mom and sisters and I gathered around my Dad's marker, put up a little Nativity scene and shared a beer.

Mom cannot pour a beer to save her life anymore. We've become such wine hounds that beer gets shoved aside. (Okay, I've never been big on the beer but that's another story.) We all got foam. Ah well... we laughed and left the last few swallows in the can for Dad, giggling over the thought of the expressions on the faces of church members coming out on Christmas morn to find a beer can sitting in the Memorial Garden.

And we knew Dad was laughing his ass off, too.

So, Dad's been gone two years now and it doesn't seem possible that it has been that long. My brother and his wife had a baby in September. Allison has been with us for a mere three months and it feels like she's been a part of our lives forever. I have no idea what we did before she came along.

My grandmother on my mother's side passed away early in the autumn and my Mom is now an orphan (along with her brother and sister) my Dad's parents are still with us but my Dad is not. My cousin and his wife had their baby girl on the 22nd. My sister's marriage is coming apart.

Ups and downs, ups and downs, ups and downs... I'm not even going to talk about the business because I hate doing that.

We've got wonderful friends all over the place, we've got family right here. It was just the girls this Christmas, Mom and her three daughters (Matt having gone to Sonora to spend Christmas with Deanna's family... we're having a Boxing Day celebration with them and the Chamberseseses this evening now that we're all back together) and we had a wonderful time together.

KJ says that my family does Christmas like you see it on TV. Well, we don't have a laugh track. Nor do we wrap our presents like they do on TV. You know how it is, where the box and the lid are wrapped separately so you can just easily open the box and then gasp and coo at what's inside? Nope. We don't do that. In fact, I wrapped one of Jessi's presents in a such a way that she struggled with the ribbon like she was tied to a chair or something. It was actually rather amusing. I thought she was going to start gnawing on it at one point. She got it open eventually and the struggle didn't even diminish the present inside. Score!

Spent the night at Mom's and woke up on Christmas to have champagne and Santa presents. It was a beautiful California Christmas Day. Blue sky, warm air, just beautiful.

For me, Christmas is green. When I was a kid, we used to come back to California every year for Christmas as that's where our family was. Mom and Dad both grew up in South Gate and so South Gate is where we would return. Some people can't stand a green Christmas, to me, that's what Christmas looks like!

My images of Christmas as a kid were always colored lights on the roofline of Spanish style houses with red tile roofs, palm trees, balmy nights and the LA freeway system. When we lived back East, I was often told that colored lights on the house were tacky.

HA!

Well, be that as it may. Goodness knows that Northern Virginia had its own ideas about Christmas decorations. The electric candles in each front window, the wreath on the front door and the spotlight on the wreath. Very nice and simple and elegant, yes? Sure, until you're leaving a Christmas party, open the front door and get a spotlight right in the eyes. What happens next? You're blind... you miss the first step and wind up pitching into the snow unable to see where the hell you're going.

Merry Christmas!

Well, I like to think that Dad did his part in relaxing the ideas of the No Va Christmas Nazis. He put colored lights on the house. He put colored lights in the bushes. And there was always an evergreen tree in the front yard that he'd put colored lights on as well. We had this Charlie Brown shrub like "tree" in the front yard in our second house and Dad always draped that thing in colored lights. It was a neighborhood joke that became a neighborhood expectation. We never did our house up in an obnoxious amount of lights... but they were always multi-colored. Because that's how it was done in California and the one thing you could never do with Mom and Dad was take California out of them.

Now we're back in California and we have been for 14 years now. There are houses that load it up with lights. Some are put on haphazardly. Some are just downright awful. But it warms my heart to see that simple row of multi-colored lights on the roofline of a simple Spanish style house. And, of course, the Christmas tree in the window.

I had my own Christmas tree this year. First time for me. Mine was in front of the window and decorated with multi-colored twinkling lights and a scant amount of ornaments. But it's mine.

Christmas isn't quite over for us. Matt and Dee and Ali are home and we're doing presents with them tonight. I miss Dad this time of year something awful... whenever I hear 'Angels We Have Heard On High' it's bittersweet. But he's with us in his way. He always is.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Had a dream the other night that Dad came home. It was Mom's house here and even though everyone was sleeping in different rooms, it didn't matter. Dad had come home and everything was fine. I remember kissing him on the cheek and telling him 'I'm so happy you're back and that everything's okay.'

Then I went upstairs to my room in Virginia.

It's been over a year. He's not coming back. I watched him die.

I hate waking up from those dreams. The minute I started typing this the tears just started streaming. I'm not weeping. It's just silent tears rolling down my cheeks.

I have dreams of Dad fairly often. If he's not actually there then I'm carrying his guitar. But when he is there, he's just doing something normal. Telling stories of which exits on the freeway go to some dive that he went to back in '71 when he was working this territory for Mobil. The other night when I kissed him on the cheek he was brushing his teeth.

I can hear him doing that. I can see him and his collection of credit card reciepts that he carried around in his front pocket. I thought of that the other day and just started crying because I knew I'd never see it again.

It doesn't feel like it's been this long.

It feels like it's been forever.

I just miss my Dad.