Tommy and Freddie were class acts. You looked forward to the annual visits to the family home.
Uncle Freddie entertained generations of kids in the family with his mimicking of a ferocious – and occasionally sweet – alley cat. A great – and frustrating ¬- part of your visit was spent on fruitlessly searching high and low to find Tiger – or whatever name Fred had decided to bestow on his little kitty that year.
It was only when you were well into your teens that you realized you’d been had all those years. There was no cat, and the meowing was the result of a subtle ventriloquist’s craft and the vivid imaginations of young and old members of the audience gathered in the lounge.
Still, as an adult, you totally bought into the ritual the kids went through every December of searching for Fred’s kitty, while he sat there with the most serious expression on his face and you knew he was simply bursting with laughter on the inside.
Together with his brother Tommy, Fred also had a tap dancing routine which was open to all although it was generally lost on the kids, who preferred to continue to hunt down that cat.
The visits were made the more pleasant by the mounds of sweets – éclairs, nougat and chocolate nuts - you were allowed to stuff into your mouth – in fact, you were generally encouraged to “take more” by well-meaning relatives who thought your skinny frame was the result of serious food deprivation on the part of your parents.
Not all visits home have the same joie de vie of uncles entertaining kids and aunts filling them to the brim with good things.
They may not quite be holidays from hell, but the encounters with the ghosts of your past lives may make for a very miserable Christmas.
There’s the great-aunt who has yet to come to terms with the fact she ended up on the wrong side of the colour bar when apartheid was introduced. She never says so, but you know your brown skin is a huge letdown, a too painful reminder that the world changed for her in 1956.
At least she lets you into her home. The step-mother who passed on a decade ago always ensured that she was only available to receive Christmas presents after dark so that her neighbours in the white group area didn’t see her black relatives.
Your mother-in-law will find something in your behaviour to whinge about this year – it may even be the same thing she whinged about last year.
Then there’s the distant uncle who flirts with you on the sly in the kitchen. He’s been trying this stunt for 30 years, since you first came home from ’varsity for the holiday get-together, having ditched your denim dungarees for that cute polka dot mini-skirt.
Cousin Clive, who arrives with wife number three and yet another promotion up the corporate ladder, proceeds to do a detailed analysis of why your choice of wheels this year, a second-hand station wagon, is the worst car ever made. And are you still in that dead-end job?
Of course, it’s here that you’ll hear that quirky pet name that only your loving extended family calls you – all 300 of them – which you hate with a passion, and them for reminding you of it every year.
There’s the uncle who has told the same jokes badly for 40 years. They’re not really jokes, just silly memories of his own growing up, or the growing up of someone he read about in one of the tatty copies of the Reader’s Digest he keeps on the bookshelf, interspersed with arbitrary factoids and homilies.
You’ve heard them, everybody else in the room knows you’ve heard them, but will the family idiot ever realize that nobody is interested in hearing his stories, especially those who’ve traveled a day-and-a-half to get here.
It’s almost as bad as the compulsion the family feels about telling your latest new (girl)friend all your embarrassing habits. They do this every year when you bring a new (girl)friend home for Christmas, under the pretext that she’s never heard the stories before. But you have – a thousand times. Doesn’t anybody care? Makes you wish that this year you really did take up your mate’s offer to go white water rafting somewhere in in the Northern Cape.
Why do you do this to yourself every year? you ask as you pack the car for the trek home, to your real home, where people who call themselves relatives don’t abuse you.
Thank goodness for distance – of bloodlines and geography! And Tommys and Freddies who create great memories of family holidays.
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