Christmas with the Nguyens

If you ever find yourself in a living room chock full of loud, personable Asians, you're probably spending Christmas with the Nguyens. This is my family: everyone's Type A, gifted at math, great at charades, and most likely a former Phone-A-Friend lifeline on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. Yes, our genetic makeup is superior to yours, and no, legally changing your last name to "Nguyen" won't change anything.

But there's one small problem with Christmas with the Nguyens. Houses just aren't large enough to contain all of us. Especially the ones in Texas, where basements don't exist. It was fine in the past when there were just the 12 of us, but now that my 7 aunts and uncles are all starting to build families of their own, it's getting harder and harder to accommodate everyone. Imagine a small army of boisterous Nguyens, 25 strong, all running around screaming, playing cards, telling stories, drinking, eating, karaoking -- all of that -- until 7 in the morning, and then waking up three hours later to do it all over again.

Every other year, we all spend Christmas together in a different state. This year's was hosted in Houston, Texas by my Aunt Kimmy, and the next one will be hosted in 2009 by my parents in Aurora, Illinois. I love my extended family but I'll be honest, I now know how the folks at the Chicago 2016 Olympic Bid Committee must feel: excited to do it, but nervous and almost cringing at the sheer magnitude of the event.

In any case, I had a blast partying in Texas this week even though, a day later, I'm still dealing with this strange noise in my head, like the weird hum you can't stop hearing hours after any rock concert.

Highlights of Christmas Week in Texas:

• 7-year-old Kellie scoring a 100 on our karaoke machine from singing "Diana" by Paul Anka.
• Aunt Kristen shrieking after unwrapping her gift to find a John Tesh CD.
• Johnathan's creepy impersonation of US Senator Larry Craig.
• My new favorite food: turducken. Aunt Kimmy slaved over it for an entire afternoon. I didn't know it was real; I thought it was just a John Madden thing. But it's very real -- a chicken inside of a duck inside of a turkey, all filled with stuffing. Beautiful.
• 25 people crammed in a house with 2.5 bathrooms meant that chances were good that every time you stepped into the john, the toilet had been used within 5 minutes. That meant that we pretty much had the vents running 24/7, because people were going in there to stink it up half the time anyway. But that didn't help Aunt Lan on Wednesday night when she entered the powder room a few seconds after I'd been in it. She jumped out, plugging her nose, saying, "You need to warn me before I walk into a cesspool like that!"

  I shrugged. "That's my turducken you're smelling."

  Then Uncle John had a really good laugh and slapped my shoulder and quipped, "I guess you put the 'turd' in 'turducken'!"

  Well played, Uncle John. Well played.