I'm not feeling very social media today. I don't care who is making an angel food cake or baking Christmas cookies. I don't care about the sale tweets. I don't want to link up or link in right now. I'm trying to convince my husband to go unplugged for the holidays and he's putting it all over the Internet how I'm bah-humbug.
It's easy for everyone to sit at their desks and side with my soul mate. They don't have to suffer through the embarrassment of blue monster-teeth icicles hanging from their eaves, giving the yuletide an eery glow. Small children with salient memories of the macabre Halloween scene at my house run screaming to the other side of the street.
Worse than what goes up outside is what happens inside this time of year. If you look closely at the picture below, you will see my spouse sitting on the floor on the left side. This is the calm before the storm, because as you can also see, our Christmas tree is not artificial, nor has it been pruned into a perfect Christmas tree triangle. Our tree is a gargantuan cedar sawed straight from the forest and then wrestled through our front door.
It's easy for everyone to sit at their desks and side with my soul mate. They don't have to suffer through the embarrassment of blue monster-teeth icicles hanging from their eaves, giving the yuletide an eery glow. Small children with salient memories of the macabre Halloween scene at my house run screaming to the other side of the street.
What happens next is horrific. Standing amidst the knots of lights facing off with an untamed sample of wilderness, my husband begins cussing the lights onto the tree. It starts in low, but then like the Whos down in Whoville, it starts to grow.
My children think this is a Christmas tradition in everyone's home. So when I suggested that we have an old fashioned Christmas and go unplugged for the holidays, everyone turned on me. They cherish the annual argument between their father and me about the gigantic length of plastic plugs, one connected to another and so forth, dangling down the front of the tree. For them, it wouldn't be Christmas if their parents didn't discuss why entire strands of lights swagged between branches instead of being nestled neatly in the tree.
And they say they love, love, love the monster teeth menacingly stretched across the porch . . . as long as I get them home before dark so they don't feel like they're walking into the jaws of doom.
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I have mixed feelings about Christmas decorations too. I guess you need to step back from the serious nature of how things should be done and see the banter between your spouse and yourself for what it is. Your children have pointed the way. Enjoy and shrug off the gloom.
My husband and I have eliminated the arguing over lights by this one thing: while he's doing the lights on the tree, I am not in the room at all! When it's finished to his satisfaction (which involves re-wrapping at least twice) I come in and hang ornaments. It's kept the peace the last 10 years!
In the past, decorating the tree was largely left to me, when I was old enough.
That's a rather sizeable tree....
Yes. Our trees are always sizable and and terribly unruly.
On another note, William, you being a man and all, I'm surprised the decorating was left up to you. Women around where I live could never voluntarily leave any part of the holiday detail to the sole discretion of a male. Don't misunderstand. We love our men and we tolerate their frequent hunting forays into the forest without interference. But once a forest sample is in the house, the rules change.
Funny! we gave up the tree two years ago...we put the nativity on the piano and add lights and greenery to that. It's great, takes 15 minutes. Christmas shouldn't be so much work!
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