Four Surprising and Occasionally Shocking Things I Learned While Visiting My Family During the Holidays

1. Despite What His Mother Thinks, My Nephew Is Probably Not Fluent in Finnish.

My nephew Teddy is just twenty months old and he's already talking up a storm. I hope that doesn't sound too braggy. I don't want to overstate his abilities. He's able to pronounce a variety of impressive and many-syllabled words, but he rarely does it in any specific order, and certainly not in ways most of us would recognize as language.

His father is content with letting him figure it out at his own pace. But his mother, either out of impatience or an overestimation of her child's talents, listens to the random vowels trickling from Teddy's mouth and hears something very different than the rest of us.

"He did it again," she announced to the room during Thanksgiving. She was sitting on the living room floor with Teddy, and because I happened to be the nearest adult family member, she waved me over to confirm her findings. "He just said something else in perfect Finnish."

I knelt next to my nephew and leaned in close. When he spoke again, I was fully prepared to be amazed. But I wasn't. To my ears, it sounded like more baby gibberish.

"Aieeouiiieee," he garbled.

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"Aiti," she said, repeating what she thought she just heard. She looked to me hopefully. "It's Finnish for mother. Did you hear that? He was looking right at me and he said aiti, clear as a bell."

I smiled and tried to look enthused. "Yeah, I guess, probably." I may not know much about parenting, but I know enough not to challenge a mother who thinks her son has done something spectacular.

He continued talking, and she continued translating his Finnish for the rest of us. In the next few minutes, he apparently asked for a cookie, reminded us that a kitten says meow, and remarked that I have a nose, all in the flawless, consonant-heavy poetry of his Mother Tongue.



My sister-in-law, as should come as no surprise, is Finnish. She's not just Finnish, she's proudly Finnish. She would've gotten married in her family's sauna if my brother had consented. (Yes, her family has a sauna, and I have been in it. In fact, the sauna is where I met her father for the first time, while he was wearing nothing but a thin sheen of sweat and a big Finnish smile.) Before her son was born, she lobbied to name him Ano, which (if she's to be believed) is a common name in Finland. My brother rejected the name almost immediately, on the grounds that he would be teased mercilessly by his peers. It isn't a long journey from "Ano" to "Anus."

Not that my opinion had any weight, but I argued for Ano. Scatological jokes aside, I enjoyed the linguistic possibilities. "Ano" easily turns into "ain't no," which leads to gut-busting comedic wordplay like "Ano Spitznagels 'round here."

Believe me, I would never, ever grow tired of saying that.

They eventually settled on Teddy, which couldn't be a less Finnish name. But my sister-in-law hasn't given up on forging a connection between her son and his Finnish roots. His room is covered in Finnish children's books with titles like Pupu Tupuna and Finn Family Moomintroll. His babysitters are all of Finnish descent, and from what I understand, she pays them a little extra if they speak only Finnish when they're with him. And during Christmas, they even took him to see the Finnish Santa, Joulupukki. Sadly, I wasn't around to witness Teddy's introduction to Finnish-style holiday mythology, but my brother was kind enough to text me the details.

"Yes," he wrote. "Old drunk 7 foot tall Santa covered in animal skins spouting Finnish to children is exactly as frightening as it sounds."

After Thanksgiving dinner, Teddy settled in to watch Bambi, his favorite movie (or at least until he gets a little older and I introduce him to the Russ Meyer oeuvre). Within moments, his mother informed us that Teddy just said hirvi, which I can only guess is Finnish for orphaned doe with eyes big as dinner plates. I smiled and nodded, but I was starting to think she might be crazy. Has anybody who actually speaks Finnish verified this kid's ability? Because honestly, I think a newborn from Finland, fresh out of the womb, probably has a better grasp of the language than Teddy does. He strikes me as being Finnish in much the same way that Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany's was Japanese.

"Did you hear that?" She asked excitedly. "He just said kissa. That means kitty. He wants his kitty, and he asked for it in Finnish!"

I could swear I just saw Teddy roll his eyes.

2. Despite What His Father Thinks, My Nephew Couldn't Care Less About Baseball.

There is no doubt in my brother's mind that his son loves baseball. And to prove it, he's purchased enough baseball supplies to support a minor league franchise. Catcher's mitts, aluminum bats, commemorative jerseys from the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers; if my brother thinks it'll reinforce Teddy's interest in sports, it added to his toy armoire. My nephew has more access to baseball paraphernalia than vegetables.

It doesn't always work out the way he's planned. Even when my brother manages to lure Teddy outside, determined to show off his skills on the ballfield, it usually ends badly. Teddy's idea of "ba-ba" - his baby-talk shorthand for baseball (or could it be a Finnish?) - involves smacking the lawn with a bat, followed immediately by chasing butterflies and leaping into the nearest bed of flowers. My brother has tried - oh god, how he's tried - to teach his son the rules, but Teddy could care less. Throw a ball in his general direction and he won't take a swing at it. He'll do a handstand and start improvising songs about bunnies.

But I'll give credit where credit is due. The kid does have a powerful arm. He can pitch a fastball right down the middle with so much velocity it could split an atom. And he's accurate, too. Point to a spot in the middle distance and he'll hit it every time. (And thanks to his dad's coaching, the strike zone is usually in the general vicinity of my testicles.) But I don't know if this means he has an enthusiasm for baseball or just throwing in general. Sure, he likes throwing balls, but he also likes throwing toys, coffee cups, TV remotes, and if they sit still long enough, small dogs.



It's really just my brother who loves baseball, and I think he knows that. But he keeps the charade alive because it allows him to indulge in his boyhood fantasies again. When I visited during the holidays, he dragged me out to the back yard almost every afternoon to play Wiffle Ball. "It's for Teddy," he promised. But soon enough, Teddy would spot an oddly-shaped stick and he'd be long gone. And then it'd just the two of us left on the makeshift ballfield.

Without fail, as soon as his son stops watching, my brother switched into hyper-competitive mode. I've always thought that the entire point of Wiffle Ball - baseball's shortbus-riding cousin - was to make it easy for the batter to get a hit. That's why the balls are big as melons and the bats are the size of a turkey leg. But he'd pitch at me like he thought there were talent scouts peering over the fence, looking to draft him into a professional Wiffle League.

"C'mon," I yelled back at him. "Stop putting so much stink on it! Let me hit one of these fucking things!"

"Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?" He said with a sneer. "You are goin' down, bitch!"

He meant it literally. It wasn't enough for me to take a swing and miss. He wanted to cause physical trauma. It was like one of those carnival booths where you buy three balls for a quarter and try to hit a clown doll. Except unlike a clown doll, I'm not filled with sand. I'm made of flesh and blood and skin that bruises very easily, especially when it's been repeatedly pounded by a hollow plastic ball.

I know how embarrassing that sounds. A Wiffle Ball is probably the least dangerous object ever invented, second only to pillows. But in my brother's hands, after he's calculated the wind resistance and perfect trajectory, a Wiffle Ball comes at you like shrapnel. And it does pretty similar damage. After awhile, I stopped "playing" in any conventional sense. I was just swinging in self-defense.

I finally gave up and limped towards the house, and my brother became irate. "You're a pussy," he yelled at me. "Come on, just a few more innings! We're just getting warmed up!"

Somewhere inside, Teddy was hurling Lego pieces at the wall, squealing with delight every time they left a decorative welt. Outside, his dad was doing something very similar, although judging from his cursing, the garage proved a less-than-satisfactory replacement for my soft, fleshy abdomen.

Like father, like son.

3. My Mom Might Be a Little Bit Racist.

My mother and late father, it should be noted for the record, are lifetime, card-carrying, bleeding-heart liberals. They voted for Democrats even when Democrats weren't voting for Democrats, and worried that terms like "African-American" might be culturally insensitive. They think Carter was our country's best President, and they never met a social injustice they wouldn't fiercely debate over cold cinnamon buns in a church basement.

But my mom, as she gets older, is becoming a little bit racist.

Not a lot racist. She hasn't started using slurs like "jiggaboo" or "camel jockey". But shades of subtle xenophobia have started to pop up in unexpected ways. Last summer, I got into a heated disagreement with her about whether Native Americans should be called "Indians."

"Oh come on," she groaned. "They need to get over themselves already."

"But they're not from India," I reminded her. "They're from North America. They were native to this continent long before we-"

"Yeah, yeah, I know. And then they made a bad deal and lost their real estate. Boo-hoo for them. Next time they should read the fine print. Besides, they get all those casinos and they don't have to pay taxes on any of them. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me."

Four years of a liberal arts education, where I had so much PC rhetoric pumped into my system that it took several years before I felt comfortable dating a woman who shaved her armpits and didn't resemble Edie Brickell, and I had no response to her wildly inappropriate comment besides, "That is so unfair."

And then this December, another nugget of under-the-radar racism slipped out. Our entire family was driving through a sketchy neighborhood in LA, and my mother mentioned, apropos of nothing, how surprised she was that so many Mexicans drank bottled water.

"What are you talking about?" We asked.

"Well, look at them," she said, pointing to various people loitering on the sidewalks, most of them of possible Mexican origin. Sure enough, they were all clutching bottles of Evian. "They love that stuff. I just don't get it."

"Well, they probably drink it for the same reasons we do," my brother suggested.

She was unconvinced. "But the water in Mexico is so dirty. Shouldn't they be used to it by now?"

It would seem my mother believes that everybody in California with brown skin has recently been smuggled across the border in a flatbed truck.

"That's a cultural cliche," I told her. "Not all of the water in Mexico is filthy."

But she'd stopped listening to us. "Wouldn't you develop an immunity to bacteria after awhile?" she asked, more to herself than to us. "They're just wasting money. That bottled water business is a racket. What's next, they're going to charge us for oxygen? I don't get people sometimes."

4. Some Awkward Conversations Just Need a Drum Roll.

When you're spending a solid week with your family, some unintentional comedy is inevitable. But what you recognize as spit-take-worthy hilarity doesn't always translate to your more humor-deprived relatives, no matter how much you stare back at them with slack-jawed disbelief.

Sometimes life needs to take a cue from the Borscht Belt. Here's an example, based on an actual conversation I had with my mother over Thanksgiving:

MOM: "Do you remember your cousin Mandy who died? She had a hole in her heart."

ME: "Really? I didn't know that. Is that what killed her?"

MOM: "No, she choked on some Pad Thai."

(Ba-da-dum.)

See how much better than works? Without the percussive payoff, it's just confusing and a little disturbing. But thanks to a gag-identifying drum roll, it becomes a goofy exchange that could've come straight from the shtick playbook of Shecky Greene.

(To read three more surprising things about my family, go here.)