Because it's not Christmas without mockery and margaritas

Every year, it seems that someone in my family ends up almost in tears (okay, men, you never cry, so forget I said that) around the table at Christmas Eve dinner. Why? Because it's tradition.

My family has, for as long as I can remember, attended mass on Christmas Eve. Afterward, we pile in the car(s) and head to our favorite Mexican restaurant for dinner. We tear through baskets and baskets of freshly made chips and ceramic bowls of salsa as if we've been stranded in the South for years without halfway decent Mexican food to be found anywhere.

But oh, wait. Some of us HAVE.

Anyway, we are VIPs at this particular restaurant, which ensures being called mija or mijo throughout the course of your meal, being served a giant pitcher of whatever drink you ordered (and sometimes even when you don't order anything), and automatically getting mild salsa on the table without having to ask for it. Dinner is always a great time, even if the rest of Christmas sucks. This year, dinner was particularly excellent, minus the absence of one little brother who's currently in tropical paradise living his dream.

Now, what normally happens is the entire family gangs up on someone to make fun of them for something they recently did or said. In years past, it's mostly been my mom, who has a tendency to mispronounce everyone's last name (looking forward to the future of America; thanks, Mom, for educating our youth) or make statements about undercover cops being dressed like palm trees.

Long story.

This year, my dad somehow became the target, which is at once unprecedented and entirely taboo—you can't make fun of the man of the house and the person who pays for dinner, right? Wrong. My non-tropical-paradise-dwelling brother and I somehow got caught up in hurling a slew of age-related jokes at my father. Some I can remember:

Did you guys think it was cool when the Industrial Revolution happened?

Did you own or rent your cannons? Or were they rent-to-own?

It must have sucked waiting for telegraphs to go through.

And Matt, please feel free to add any others. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time, and I think I'll always remember this Christmas Eve as the one where the joker finally got it from the jokees.