Читать книгу Justin Bieber - First Step 2 Forever, My Story - Justin Bieber - Страница 12

Our tradition was always to gather at Grandpa and Grandma’s house early in the afternoon. She’d have the tree up and decorated with all the usual ornaments dragged down from the attic. People would start showing up, and by dinner time there was quite a crowd gathered. And not just the usual grandparents, kids, grandkids. Our extended family is really – well, I guess “extended” is a good word.

See, my mom’s biological father died when she was a baby, so Grandpa is totally her dad, but technically he’s her stepfather, who married Grandma when Mom was two, which is how my mom actually ended up with a half-brother and a stepbrother both named Chris, because Grandpa already had kids from a previous marriage. It would suck for her stepsiblings and their kids not to be with their dad/grandpa at Christmas, so Grandpa’s ex-wife and her husband come with their kids, plus cousins on this side, and step-sibs on the other side, and after a while it’s pretty complicated trying to keep track of which cousin belongs to whose aunt, or who’s the stepson of the great-uncle, or the grandkid of the step-aunt – and you end up realizing it really doesn’t make any difference.

We’re a family.

We all have Christmas dinner, and I’m telling you, my grandma puts up an awesome Christmas dinner. Turkey and gravy. I wish I could have a trough of that stuff on my bus after the show. (We all work up an appetite during a performance.) It’s the best. We all eat until we’re about to roll over. Then we play this gift-exchange game with dice. Everybody shows up with a gift. If you’re a girl, bring a gift for a girl; if you’re a guy, bring a gift for a guy. That way there’s the right number of each. You take turns rolling the dice, and, if you roll doubles, you grab a gift. If you roll doubles again, you get to grab somebody else’s gift. There’s always a lot of horsing around and teasing, but nobody actually gets mad because you don’t know what’s in the package anyway, so why would you care if your gift gets stolen? You get another turn, and the game keeps going until everybody has a gift. Then we all open our gifts and end up trading anyway.

That’s how we are in my family. Every person gives what they have. If this particular gift isn’t what you need, maybe that gift over there works for you, and, meanwhile, the first gift is exactly what somebody else needs. You can’t always get what you want. But, if you’re lucky, you get what you need. And I was lucky. Along with a lot of other blessings, I got my family – just the way they are. And now my extended family extends even wider to include Scooter, Carin, Kenny, Ryan and Dan and a lot of other people I’ll tell you about a little later in this book.

“That’s how we are in my family. Every person gives what they have”