I was raised in a strict Cthulic household and my squamous forebearers piped unsettlingly when I first brought home something filled with legible text that did not warp the mind unlike our Good Books, but a consultation with the naked January night sky on a half-frozen beach in the Northeast US when the aurora borealis was particularly intense convinced them there was nothing wrong with it.
Unfortunately for them, I met some Heaven's Gate folks through our local gaming store, and fell in with some bad kool-aid. I'm not sure they ever totally got over their suspicion with these tomes of non-maddening sanity, and I know they were disappointed when I brought home a satan-worshiping anarchist from my afterschool pottery class and told them we were in love. Can't say I blame them, they taught me to save myself for the infinite cosmos and its crushing isolation, but I couldn't help it, Jess was cute and I was 17 and wanted something more than the madness of an utterly nihilistic universe. She had a fire in her eyes. Also, she had no more than two, and they were mostly symmetrical.
'Course then she got Born Again when I left to go to college and I started dabbling in African disapora mystical religions, so we fell apart. She got really into exegesis, I got really into sacrificing chickens to call upon Baron Saturday, we just became different people.
I hear she lives in Spokane these days. We're not really friends on Facebook. It...didn't end peacefully.
Anyway, Christmas is still weird. Most of my old gaming group jumped aboard the Hale-Bopp train to somewhere better, so I don't really reconnect with the old mates these days. My new group is in NYC where I live so, you know, mostly folks who worship the Flayed God Xipe Totec, but they're more culturally Totecish than religiously Totecish. Y'know, they make good tortillas at Tlacaxipehualiztli. But they don't celebrate the same Festival Of Colourless Light that my family does, so they're not the type you invite home. I mean, maybe someday Brenda will come back with me, but we haven't been dating for even one tonalpohualli yet, so definitely not this year.
But hell, at least I'm not the black sheep of the family.
I mean...my brother is a Detroit Lions fan.