Black Christmas (Plus Bonus Story "Black Supper") Read Free

was pretty sure Nick’s mom, who didn’t even speak Japanese very well at this point, despite her parents barely speaking English, came to the United States when she was four or five. So to call her an immigrant was only marginally accurate, at least in terms of culture.
    Culturally speaking, Yumi Tanaka was American, through and through.
    Whatever the mish-mash of their family’s backgrounds and philosophical views on American culture itself, on the issue of Christmas, they were all in perfect agreement.
    Namely, they went all out.
    Their Christmas started firmly at ten o’clock in the morning on Christmas Eve.
    It was pretty much a full two-day affair too––including sleepovers for those directly involved––and not including all of the decorating, tree hunting and gathering, gift shopping, alcohol purchasing, cooking, clothes shopping and other pre-Christmas festivities that occurred in the lead-up weeks prior to the event.
    At the Tanaka house, it was all big trees, lights everywhere, gifts for Nick’s nieces and nephews that were often as tall as they were, stockings on the chimney, Christmas carols, plates of cookies and carrots for Santa and his reindeer... a disturbingly large collection of Christmas decorations on the lawn and multi-colored lights on the eaves.
    Some of that might have been the shift in incomes, since one of Nick’s older sisters hit it big as a corporate lawyer and investment banker.
    About ten years ago, she’d moved their parents to a house in Potrero Hill, which gave them the freedom to indulge their Christmas fetish to a whole new level. Their old neighborhood in Hunter’s Point, where Nick grew up with Angel, tended to be a lot less “festive.” In Hunter’s Point, Christmas decorations were more likely to be ripped out of lawns or off roofs... or maybe wrapped around the front bumper of some punk kid’s car as he did donuts in your front yard.
    Their new place in Potrero Hill was significantly more neighborly.
    Potrero Hill meant long walks to look at the other houses on the street where all of the trees were lit up and their neighbor’s Christmas displays gave them a run for their money. Potrero Hill meant bus trips down to Ghiradelli Square to get chocolate and watch the lit-up cable cars pass by. Potrero Hill also meant bigger trees from the tree farms up near Big Basin, along with more singing, more presents, more shopping... more lit-up reindeer on the lawn and more ridiculous inflatable Santa Clauses and abominable snowmen and oversized wreaths.
    Nick wouldn’t take no for an answer this year.
    Believe me, I tried.
    I even tried feigning sick, but he didn’t buy it.
    He sent Angel and her cousins to get me the morning of Christmas Eve–-which they did––enveloping me in warm, jacket-clad bodies and talking over and around me in loud voices as we stuffed ourselves in the back of Angel’s mint condition, midnight blue with white racing stripes, 1970 Plymouth Hemi Barracuda. It was a vehicle I often forgot she had since she only rode her motorcycle to work, and generally kept her car safely locked in a garage where she maybe wiped it down with an oiled cloth diaper once a week.
    It was a tight fit, getting five of us in the back seat and two up front with Angel, who gripped the wheel like she expected us to hit an IED any minute.
    The car was her baby, though.
    She’d fixed it up with her father before he died.
    She only took it out a few times a year, and usually for road trips. Carting around the female half of her extended family in the middle of a major city to pick up alcohol, coffee, donuts for the next morning and more corn chips for Nick’s cousins before heading to the Tanaka house probably had her blood pressure halfway up to critical.
    Angel’s family, the Deveraux’s, were equally Christmassy in orientation as the Tanakas, so when I got crammed into that back seat between four of her cousins, spirits were already high. I almost couldn’t hear for the