SAN FRANCISCO — Local punk John Adler is one of the unlucky few who will be leaving his comfortable life with seven roommates in a two-bedroom apartment to head home for the holidays and be reminded of all the terrible family members who didn’t die this year.
“Most of the time it’s easy for me to forget these people and focus on my bootleg tee-shirt business, but then Christmas rolls around and my mom starts calling with all the Catholic guilt she can muster up and it all hits me again like a ton of bricks,” said Adler while smoking weed with his cousin. “I have so many friends with relatives that died from Covid and I just don’t understand how they got so lucky. I’m going to be stuck at a Christmas Eve mass with my Uncle Steve, the guy that tried to stab me with a butter knife last year when I called Trump a Nazi. Why aren’t these people dead?”
Adler’s family home is in an affluent suburb of San Francisco and his parents will be hosting multiple holiday events he will be forced to attend.
“Oh we’re just so excited to have Johnny home for Christmas,” said Adler’s mother Bernadette. “He says he’s happy with his friends in Los Angeles, but nothing can make a young boy happier than being with his loving mother on the most glorious day of the year. I just pray that one-day God gives him the strength to leave his life of sin behind and stop selfishly killing us. We gave him so much as a boy, I don’t know how he could abandon us like this.”
Mental health professionals across the country say the holidays are a particularly trying time for everyone.
“Hundreds of thousands of families are gathering together and coping with the loss of loved ones, and then there are the families who have avoided tragedy entirely and that’s the problem,” said licensed therapist Scott Tibor. “There is always that one uncle that no one invites but he shows up anyway spouting conspiracy theories and accusing other family members of being pedophiles. Somehow this person didn’t get sick and die from Covid, but we lost so many hard-working nurses and school teachers. Life is unfair like that.”
Virologists still offer some hope that above-average flu numbers and new Covid strains could kill off some of the more annoying family members by Easter.