THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

DBZ © Akira Toriyama, Bird Studios, etc.
FanFiction © Stef-chan

Some people, whether they believe in Santa Claus or not, tend to spend their time composing a long list of gifts that they truly wish to possess. 

There would be the little girl, feverishly writing a letter to Mr. Claus for something as simple as a stuffed bear or as outlandish as a brown pony with pink bows braided into their manes.  There would be the young gentleman whose reputation in high school yearns for the sexiest scent in cologne, the newest hairstyle, and the car that no one in the neighborhood has the money to buy.  There would the lonely housewife who would die for a romantic dinner and a four-karat diamond ring from the busy husband whose face she never has the opportunity to see.

Well not me.  I have never had a list, only because there isn't anything in the world that my wallet cannot obtain.  Never once have I failed to walk down the streets of my city without the latest alligator leather purse or an expensive nail job at a place where only the rich and popular go.  I am rich and popular.

Therefore, Christmas has never been any different to me than a shopping spree with a newly charged credit card, with an exception of the fact that it is my friends and family that shops for my stead.  Of course, there is the difference when it comes to the tree and the colorful wrapping paper and the holiday tunes by nameless choirs humming in the background.

But uh, don't get me wrong though.  I love receiving presents.  After all, I'm Bulma Briefs.  I love receiving and I love attention, and the spirit of the mostest and the bestest holiday of the year is like the cherry on top.  Even as an adult, I still make sure to fall asleep on the couch with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk beside me, along with hopes of making a newspaper headline by catching the real Mr. Claus. 

But I have never in my entire life felt the true spirit of Christmas, but once—and only once.

Christmas to most is a glamorous holiday.  It is, by far, the most extensively decorated, what with its twinkles and glitters and shimmers and glows.  Everything about Christmas is supposed to be beautiful, from the laughter, to sleigh bells, to the mistletoes, to its kisses; from stockings, to ribbons, to gingerbread, and to lawn decorations.  We spend 364 days dreaming about the perfect Christmas, but seldom do we ever have that stereotyped wonderland.

My most memorable Christmas was just one of those holiday disappointments.

I remember it being the most awkward Christmas ever.  It never snowed that winter—not a single snowflake.  Instead, it rained like there was no tomorrow, occasionally hailing and destroying my mom's prized garden pets.  There were moments when the power went out and all the Christmas lights, both indoor and out, shut down into total darkness.  It had been cold, boring, and wet.

I also remember that it was the winter right after my crazy adventure to Namek with Krillin and Gohan, and the first Christmas without Son Gokou.  Christmas was empty and obscure without Gokou's goofy smile and naïve innocence.  Everyone's spirit had been killed that winter because half the time we celebrated, we were all thinking about the absence of our hero.

That crazy Saiya-jin…

I remember my house had been filled with green people—aliens, no less—and the normally quiet house had been filled with sounds of foreign babble.  I cannot forget the way they brought an interesting odor in my house or the way my mother flitted around the building like a frenzied hen, trying to pour tea into each of their cups despite their insistence that they prefer water.  I remember there was one Namek who was trying to practice his golf swings and breaking a window in the process, while another more inquisitive Namek kept interrogating papa about Earth's modern technology.

I also recall being pissed off nearly the whole of the holiday season, mainly due to a certain telephone argument I had with Yamcha.  It was a big argument over something that was probably really trivial, but I never saw his face that winter.  Neither one of us had the guts to break our pride and apologize until the following spring, when we eventually made up with a hasty kiss after deciding that the single life was way too boring.

And then I remember the pessimistic loner: Vegeta.

He was a bigger booger than I was about the season.  He was the black ink stain on the white table cloth; the lone needle in a haystack; the right shoe on the left foot.  Now mind you, this was way before the two of us were even remotely close to thinking about getting together, so there were still the fresh bitter feelings between the two of us.  He was the murderer who killed my boyfriend; I was, simply, the idiot next to "Kakarot".  He criticized, I complained, he destroyed my property, I destroyed his eardrums—we just pretty much rubbed against each other like two sheets of sandpaper.

I remember thanking Kami that Vegeta only stayed with us for a year before taking off on that spaceship to train out in the universe.  But I remember standing there weeks after his departure, watching from the window the spot where the spaceship used to be, and remembering how Mr. Ebenezer Grinch Scrooge had presented me the most interesting of all Christmases ever. 

Cliché, I know, but there is no other way around it: He showed me the true meaning of Christmas.

"Well Bulma," I can almost hear you say sarcastically with a roll of your eyes.  "We know the story.  Did Vegeta give you his first kiss?  He confessed his love for you and it touched the bottom of your soul?  He shared with you his tragic past and you learned how to appreciate your comforts?  Did he lecture you?  Did he buy you a present?  Did he, to get totally creative, sit beside you before the fireplace and shared a mug of hot cocoa while holding hands with you?"

…Well uh, okay.  You got every one of those guesses kinda wrong…

Let me care to remind you that this was when he hated my guts and the guts of all mankind more than anything in the world.  He never failed to let me know that humans were stupid and that, with an exception of Kakarot, whom he thought was more human than Saiya-jin, I was the stupidest of them all.  He hated the smell of pine.  Hated the chit-chattering of the Nameks and abhorred my attempts to make him feel the least bit comfortable in my home.  He hated it when I asked questions, when I sang a Christmas carol, when I baked cookies (though granted, he never complained while he was eating them) and most especially, he hated my very existence.

Sometimes, he hated me and the entire situation he got himself into so much, that we would often spend days, even weeks, without seeing one another or passing a word between us. 

I was okay with it at the time, since I disliked him just as much.

"So what happened?" you're probably saying.

Well, the day had been, like I said, a rainy one.  Previously on Christmas Eve, there had been a huge party at my place, in which residents of Earth and Namek joined as one huge, huge family.  There were jokes, gift exchanges, singing, dancing, goofing off, and occasionally, moping about how the party would have been twice as great with Gokou's presence.  The Namek natives, despite their protests, were tempted into drinking all sorts of alcohol, from sake to champagne to an extremely sweet version of wine. 

If you think drunk aliens on Christmas Eve might have been bad, then you should have seen them on New Years Eve.  Hehehe…  But of course, that's a story for another day.

Well anyway, because of the heavy partying that night, on Christmas morning, everyone (besides Vegeta, who had been too wary of the Z-senshi to get wasted) was asleep like rocks.  Had it not been for the snoring, you would think that an epidemic or something wiped all those people out.  Even Bunny overslept an hour or two.  It was totally ridiculous and, in a sense, kind of funny.

But I remember that sleeping like corpses wasn't really what wasted half the day, but rather the hours spent on nursing the Nameks from their hangover.  Lasted all friggin' day, if I am recalling correctly. 

Excluding Vegeta and some of the younger Nameks who didn't drink, I was actually the first to get up for Christmas.  I was greeted that pro-morning, pre-afternoon not only with a headache, but with the sight of dark clouds and a burgeoning rainstorm outside of my bedroom window—a beautiful way to start the best day of the year.

Ah, but that's not all.  I was also greeted with the sight of Vegeta sitting cross-legged in the middle of the lawn with the pouring rain beating down on that funny hair of his.  I remember that I could not, for the good of anyone, figure out what in the world that Saiya-jin was doing just sitting there like a lawn gnome.  I began thinking that he was locked outside, for with my half-drunken state, it never quite occurred to me that if that had been the case, Vegeta would have blasted down half the building without any hesitation.  Instead of realizing this, however, I quickly wore my clothes inside-out and ran outside with a huge umbrella over my head.

"Hey you!" I remember calling out, not at all surprised when he didn't even twitch at the sound of my voice.  "What are you doing just sitting there?  Get inside before mom wakes up and fusses over you and the carpet you'll probably soak."

He didn't budge.  Jerk.  With my new boots sloshing in cold mud, I walked over in front of him and held the umbrella above the both of us.  I remember feeling cold raindrops sliding down my back and the air slapping my face red.  But the entire time I was shivering under my thin clothes, I was focused on the hairy midget and his kami-forsaken meditation.

"Hel-lo?!  Earth to jerk!  Earth to jerk!  Do you read me?!  I'm freezing cold out here and you're probably already half ice by now.  Get inside this instant before I shriek at you!"

He never replied, never quite said a word.  He just opened his closed eyes and tilted his head upwards to look me straight in the eye… 

…And I remember feeling as if the whole world froze, as if Kami pressed the PAUSE button or something.  There was so much hatred, so many conflicting feelings of advocacy.  I felt as if I was blamed for every freaking problem he had, and as I stood there while he just sat there glaring, I felt like I interrupted one of his most private moments.  And when he slid that mouth into a frown and his throat emitted a soft growl, I felt more threatened than if he was shoving one of his fancy-shmancy attacks into my face.

I remember retreating a step or two back, forgetting entirely about the weather.  I let the cold rain beat against him.  I let him sit there, his bottom floating in mud and shriveled grass.  I only stared at him a few moments, exposed and attacked by his furious expression, before I hurriedly ran back inside and shut the door.

It was a weird experience indeed.  Never, in all of his previous verbal threats and tantrums, had I ever shuddered as much as that one look made me do.  He was a man who possessed many ways of facially expressing anger, but only that one look had been capable of imprinting a lasting memory into my brain.  I remember how every hair of his black eyebrows dripped like ink, while at the same time, eyes equally dark glowed and radiated overwhelming and powerful emotions.  It's kind of like staring at a pair of loaded guns pointed straight towards your face, as if in any second, those guns would shoot something that could kill you instantly.

But contrasting that, contrasting those creepy and slightly unattractive veins that pulsated in his throat, I couldn't help but notice the way the rain slid down his face.  Kind of like…tears, you know?  I realize how cliché the whole tear versus rain thing is, but it's the truth and there just isn't any way to describe it.  By that expression on his face, I honestly couldn't tell if he was crying because he was angry, or if he was angry because he was crying.

"Just forget it," I remember saying to myself as I folded the umbrella and set it beside the door.  "Psycho, homicidal, serial killers do weird stuff like sitting in the frozen rain and torturing themselves like there's no tomorrow.  If he wants to die of pneumonia or something of the like, then it's his problem.  I hope he does die from it!"

And that was that.  No thought about it the rest of the afternoon, for soon, the drunk Nameks began waking up one by one. 

I didn't see Vegeta again until late into the night when the Nameks who woke up went back to sleep for the night.  Only a few of the older members decided to stand out in the back porch after the rain subsided to stare out into the patches on the sky where the clouds didn't cover up the stars.  They stood there with their hands clutched behind their backs, mumbling in their native language about Guru and the vacant area in the sky where their home used to float.

I remember turning my gaze towards a digital clock.  It was past midnight and I was watching the weather channel with disdain as the weatherman introduced another full week of rain that would initiate just a couple of hours before noon.  Growing weary of the depressing news and the sappy Christmas movies scattered throughout the channels, I turned the television off and went towards my room to get some rest. 

Along the way, I passed by the parlor-esque living room where the carpet was tainted with shredded scraps of wrapping paper and colorful ribbons from the previous Christmas Eve party.  But there, right there in the middle of the room where the Christmas tree was poised, Vegeta was standing there with his feet apart to shoulder width and his arms crossed securely like a pretzel. 

His facial expression at that moment seemed not to be related to the violence that he portrayed earlier on in the day.  It was as if the morning hadn't even occurred, as if the glare that I remembered had been from a dream.  Maybe it was from a dream.  Who knows?

Contradicting the morning's events, Vegeta was standing there, staring at each colored light as if light bulbs were new to him.  He stared at every reflection glinting off of the round, metallic ornaments.  He followed the trail of tinsel, moving only his eyeballs as he did so.  He occasionally stopped to look at the homemade wooden ornaments, on which I glued pictures of myself, my family, and my friends during a previous Christmas.  Then his head tilted up and he stared at the star, which glowed a brilliant gold with jewel-like lights on each of the five points.  Our Christmas star, I often commented on previous Christmases, was like a beautiful crown on a king's head. 

He stared at that star the longest.

Then he turned his head and looked at me kind of defensively in that rigid posture of his.  But differently than his usual, his nose wasn't tilted so upwards.  It wasn't so aristocratic.  It was more…humble.  Kind of thoughtful.  As if though he seemed to be defending his curiously, slightly vulnerable, stature, he wasn't trying to shield away so much of himself this time.  His expression was almost inviting.

"This is my first Christmas."

That was all he said.  Kind of gruff, kind of in a rude tone, but it was as if in those five words, he was saying so much more.   I still, to this day, cannot figure out why in the world he told me that this miserable, boring winter was his first Christmas, and in a way as if he actually appreciated the human holiday.  He gave me the entire night, or rather, the entirety of my life, to wonder about it, because really, those five words were all he said before he turned back around and fascinated over the Christmas tree some more.

In the remainder of that night, I had laid in bed wondering. 

Vegeta never received a single present, neither at the party nor the entirety of the Christmas day.  The only excitement he could have possibly had in those two days was the pitiful hours spent sitting in the cold rain.  What had he been thinking about during those hours?  Had he been wondering what it would have been like to have a crazy party at his home planet with his deceased family?  Had he thought about his friends?  …Well, if he ever had any friends, that is.  I mean, maybe he had been thinking about that big bald guy he killed.

Or maybe he had been thinking about his situation, about how he was practically homeless and useless and living off of "charity" offered by some shrill-voiced girl.  He could have been meditating about becoming stronger by trying to calculate on what it would take to overcome what he witnessed off of Gokou and that Frieza guy.  Or perhaps Vegeta had walked down memory lane, remembering all the stuff that he did during this time of the year, purging planets, shooting off heads, getting pushed around by people stronger than him, while people like me, with my wallet full of credit cards, were laughing and joking and getting drunk while exchanging little knick-knacks.

Thinking about it, if I had been him, I'd probably be angry enough to cry too, given that this was what he had been thinking.

But as I had watched him admiring such trivial traditions like the Christmas tree with its tinsel and whatnot, I just got the feeling that the only thing he was thinking and feeling was appreciation.  Appreciation that such a holiday even exists.  Appreciation that it was possible for people to laugh and get ridiculously drunk, regardless of whether or not you're human.  Appreciation that, on this one particular moment of the year, he was able to distract himself from all his problems and give himself the time to watch something he probably never experienced: True joy.

Of course, these are all speculations.  I'm married to that guy and I share two kids with him, but I've never really built up the guts to ask him what in the world went on in his bizarre little mind that day.  Yet for the strangest reason, during that queer day with nothing but the least appreciative things about Christmas, and from the most unlikely of all people, I learned. 

…I don't know what I learned, but I learned something.  And I suppose Vegeta did too.

Stef-chan's Notes

Merry Christmas in July.  I can't believe it took six months for me to have the guts to post this…  ;  And thank you, Veroni, for BETA-ing.  She's the best BETA ever.  You should read some of her stuff on her pen name, Walis