The Christmas Situation

Ummmm. Is it just me, or does it look like the Holy Family ought to get the hell out of the barn?! Incoming!

So here it is, that season when people get all charitable (i.e., filled with guilt) and help their neighbors (whom they ignore 11 months out of 12) and spend quality time with their families (mostly by ignoring the heavy pall of butt-gas in the overcrowded room). Yes, it’s CHRISTMAS! The most wonderful time of the year!

I have always adored Christmas—especially the music. White Christmas, Winter Wonderland, Silver Bells, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire…Ahhhhhhh. I could listen to velvety voices of Karen Carpenter, Bing Crosby, and Johnny Mathis all year long. And sometimes I do. Just to annoy other people in July.

Another element of Christmas that I love is the decorating. I own 23 plastic tubs full of things to make my season bright. In my defense, I forced myself to discard some items last year, and eliminated 3 whole tubs. So. Yeah.

My mother passed along in my DNA her innate design capabilities, and I can create a Christmas tree almost as spectacular as one of hers. She erected a stunning tree each year, and she ensured that it was elegant by not allowing my brother or me to touch a single needle. One year, I found an open package of silver tinsel—which looked like excessively long, shiny angel hair pasta—lying on the dining room table. I’d studied how Mother’d pinched a hank of tinsel in between two fingers and a thumb; how she’d stood back looking for the perfect spot that had needed more sparkle; how she’d flipped the silver strands onto the tree, all wrist action and precision.

So I gave it a go, and damned if my one, little addition didn’t make the whole tree look like shit. Unfortunately, once the tinsel is on the tree, it takes a degree in aerospace technology to remove it. Yeah. My mom came. She saw. She screeched. For a long, long time. So my bruised ego and new asshole and I spent the rest of the afternoon in my room.   

What sucks is that I have learned that my mother was right. If one wishes to have a lovely, HGTV-worthy Christmas tree, one must keep the children far, far away. My daughters—adults, really—should know how to decorate a tree properly. But should know is a freaking long way from know.

All through Thanksgiving week this year, the girls insisted that they be allowed to ornament our pre-lighted 7-footer. When they assembled the thing by inserting the middle section onto the stand first and then couldn’t figure out the difference between the much larger bottom third and the tapered top, I should’ve had that first whiff of understanding. This is what happens when parents don’t pay attention. One minute, you’re not looking, and the next minute, your child is on t.v. for an armed robbery that you never saw coming.

So, after I solved the enigmatic, three-piece puzzle, I provided a short tutorial on “fluffing” the tree branches. When a tree has been in storage for a year, its poor limbs have been smashed and folded in hideous ways. Each 7-pronged branch must have its arms straightened and then its ends slightly curled upwards so that anyone with blocked nasal passages would believe the tree had been freshly killed right in our own backyard.

My girls made some cursory fluffs here-and-there and then jumped on hanging the ornaments. We have everything from hand-painted Italian orbs to chunky stars of green-tinted rice made by one of the girls in pre-K. The overall design of a finished tree should be an eclectic and perfectly balanced mix of nostalgia and shimmer. But when the girls pronounced the tree “finished,” WTF?

My children are NEVER touching my tree again. Ever. The matted branches looked like homeless-people hair, and there were gaping holes, blank spots and then jumbles of ornaments in clusters. Students from a fucking blind academy could have done a better job. Limbless people flinging ornaments with their teeth could have done a better job. I could’ve dug up my mother, and her dead-self could have done a better job. Plus she could’ve shown me how to make that dressing for which she forgot to leave me a recipe.   

Damn. Kids today! They don’t know anything. They have no clue how to decorate a Christmas tree. They don’t understand Christmas music that doesn’t have a techno-beat or a caterwauling former Disney star. They think that Bing is just a freaking search-engine, for Christ’s sake! Christmas is supposed to be filled with joy and beauty and holiness. And that does not include the exclamation, “Holy shit!” upon viewing one’s Christmas tree.