Christmas. With a Bullet.

So Epiphany was this week, which is historically the day when people remove their Christmas decorations unless they're unspeakably lazy or unspeakably Southern. Where I live it's not uncommon to turn off the main road in the middle of the summer, your tires crunching on gravel as you notice a hard plastic baby Jesus sleeping peacefully beside a lawn chair and a box of Black Cat fireworks.

I spent Wednesday afternoon removing the lights from my living room windows, chugging the remaining holiday-themed cans of Diet Coke and wondering whether poinsettias were recyclable. The fact that I unholiday-ed my house on a Catholic feast day was purely coincidence and not out of tradition, since the only feast days I actively recognize fall during All You Can Eat Pancake Week at IHOP. Anyway, since Christmas is officially over, it's past time for me to recap my own holiday, one already relegated to soft-focus memories and the fruitcake chunks that still cling to the folds of my colon.

I drove home to West Virginia on Christmas Eve, where I was greeted with 70 mph winds and intermittent blackouts. Regardless of our stockpiled flashlights and space heaters and Sour Patch Kids (my contribution to the emergency kit) we still cursed and muttered every time the microwave clock went dark, since my parents live in the kind of rural area where Google Maps just shrugs and shows a blank grey screen. A long power outage would've meant we'd be either emptying the refrigerators into the snow--in the hopes the rib roast and baby carrots would remain frozen--or we'd all be sitting under the tree swapping food-borne illnesses.

Fortunately, the lights always came back on. Unfortunately, the ice-encrusted weather forecast kept my sister confined to her new house, which brushes against Cleveland's more-photogenic side. It was the first time she and I had been separated for Christmas, the first time we wouldn't wake up and wriggle into our new matching pajamas before we'd try to embarrass each other in front of our parents by giving each other the most squirm-worthy gifts possible.

Last year, she was delighted when I untied a ribbon and peeled back the wrapping paper to discover a box of industrial strength douches, the kind that could also be used to pressure-wash your vinyl siding. This year instead of tearing into the pubic lice treatment kit I'd purchased for her, she was stuck in a neighboring state getting text-by-text accounts of everything happening in the living room.

The morning got off to a perfect start, unfolding just as Norman Rockwell would've sketched it, assuming he would've ignored my hubcap-sized pores and didn't draw in the squiggly stink lines radiating from the dog's mouth, which always smells like a mix of Beggin' Strips and rotting skin. The other details were magazine-spread perfect, from the handmade stockings to the carefully arranged packages to the flickering evergreen-scented candles, the ones that helped us all pretend that the tree hadn't spent the summer months in a cardboard box behind the weed killer and wood varnish.

CONFIDENTIAL TO MY MOTHER: Really, the tree was beautiful. I'm just being descriptive for these people who weren't sitting on the sofa with us. Yes, I'm sure they would've taken their shoes off before stepping on the rug and no, none of them would've stolen the hand towels.

I quickly tore through my entire stack of packages, scraps of wrapping paper fluttering slowly to the carpet and bits of tape clinging to my forearms. Christmas morning is always the most frenzied thirty seconds of my calendar year, not counting the two or three times I have sex. With another person.

I was already thumbing through my new 2010 running log and upending the last of the eggnog-flavored creamer into my coffee mug when my mother began unwrapping the ribbons on her first gift, a small rectangular box. She pulled the paper open and gave an audible gasp.

"Bullets?!" she asked, incredulous. "BULLETS?"

She turned her head toward my uncle, since his name was inked on the 'From' section of the tag. He grinned. She opened the carton and held it up for us to see before quickly dropping the box on the coffee table. The metal pieces clinked against each other as they landed, Christmas quickly transitioning from a Capra flick to Full Metal Jacket.

Mom reached for another identically-papered package and if you see where this is going, you terrify me. You may also be familiar with the finer points of restraining orders. She dug into the wrappings and found--yes!--the gun that matched the ammo. She gingerly opened the top of its hard plastic case and immediately recoiled like she'd been given either an incinerated housecat or one of my senior prom pictures.

She gathered herself, re-opening the box and pulling the gun out of the soft foam surrounding it. It was a snubnose .38 revolver, I later learned, and immediately iPhoned a picture of it to my sister. She called me within seconds, shrieking.

"OUR MOM IS PACKING HEAT? WHAT THE FUCK?!"

"No shit," I said, both of us rubbing profanity all over the floor.

"This will not end well," she said, no doubt punctuating the sentence with a shake of her head. "She's gonna be all 'GIVE ME MY ANN TAYLOR DISCOUNT! I HAVE A GUN'"

"SHUT UP AND POINT ME TOWARD THE PETITE DEPARTMENT!" I shouted back.

"GET ON THE FLOOR AND SHOW ME THE CASUAL KNIT SEPARATES!"

Our mother--still holding a firearm--turned to me and shouted loud enough for my sister to hear through the earpiece "I KEPT THE RECEIPTS FOR ALL OF YOUR PRESENTS."

"And she's got a gun."

We hung up.

There's something off-the-charts unsettling about seeing your mother holding a handgun, even if she's wearing an appliqued Christmas sweatshirt and calmly sipping from a coffee mug with the Cascade-faded logo from our elementary school. I stared at her, briefly feeling like John Connor in Terminator 2 right after his mom started open-firing. Then I wondered at what point she'd drop her biscotti and start doing pullups.

"Open the next one," my uncle encouraged. "It's a purse holster."

"Way to ruin the surprise," I sniped, secretly relieved he hadn't hidden some surface-to-air missiles or a rocket launcher or a well-sedated hostage beneath the Happy Feet wrapping paper.

My uncle is an interesting guy, if you consider people who give weapons as gifts to be interesting. He lives on the western edge of an entirely different southern state, one where the residents tend to be familiar with Skoal rings and GEDs and fishing with dynamite. He's a borderline survivalist, the kind of person I thought only lived on the Discovery Channel or in Eddie Bauer ads. We've never quite established what he does for a living, since he goes off the radar for months at a time, most likely making a nest for himself in some rarely-traveled national park, living on rhododendron leaves and his own fingernail clippings.

"You need to get started too," he said, pointing a finger at my dad.

Dad did as he was told and grabbed the box on the floor closest to his foot, running his fingers underneath the edges of the paper.

"Bullets," he said.

He reached for another box with identical wrappings when I grabbed my new pajama pants, my brand new running shoes and a stack of biscotti and quietly slipped out of the room.

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