A Christmas Memory

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A Christmas Memory Sun baked beige brown grass crunched under my feet as I ran around the canal behind my Lela’s house. Six years ago I was not a very normal nine years old. While my cousins stayed inside singing pointless Christmas carols, I was outside trying to pet the ducks in the swampy mud brown water that did a perfect U behind my Lela’s house. The bank I had slipped down a few minutes before was crawling with the little fire ants that just had their nest ruined by my clumsy nine years old feet. I was skeptical about walking back up that embankment as the furious – panic filled – bugs swarmed. My family had always had this stupid tradition of getting together every Christmas eve with the kids and throwing a huge party. We were all Hispanic, so our family was not small in any way. Imagine forty of your closest relatives gathering together and inviting forty of their closest relative on their other side to get together – not fun. Because of all the people, we had to gather at my Lela’s house to fit all of them in one place. And the worst part of all was that they would dress all the little girls up in frilly wool dresses the color of cherries and have us sing out tiny heads off. My cousins never had a problem with this – they even seemed to enjoy the attention – but I was a different story. Who in their right mind would make someone wear a two inch thick wool monstrosity in Florida during the “winter?” It was never cold, just dry! No rain but plenty of heat, aka Hell but worse! My Titi Marisol still managed to wrestle me into the dress, but I slipped away the second she turned her back – I never sang anyways, just glared at all my relatives that thought this was cute. Now I stumbled around the bank of the canal trying to coax the ducklings over with bread from the party. All the other ducklings ignored me but one. It was brown where its siblings were
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