1. Getting all
that crap out of the attic.
Dragging boxes
out of their non-holiday nursing home wasn’t such a big deal 20 years and 30
pounds ago. It wasn’t my favorite activity even then, but I could generally
haul the goods in under 15 minutes without breaking a sweat or requiring reconstructive
surgery after the deed was done. Then again, those were my “salad” days
(translation: broke-ass poor) and I had maybe three boxes of mostly handmade or
handed-down yuletidery.
Now? Good God.
Just opening the
attic door and lowering the ancient ladder causes me to have a small anxiety
attack, with whimpering and such. Then I have to rest halfway up that stupid
ladder because I’m so out of shape that turning on a light switch wears me out.
After the pit stop, I finally make it up to the last few rungs where I can
begin the ritual of searching for the invisible hanging chain that is connected
to the light that only gets turned on twice a year, four times if something
dies up there and we notice an odd smell while watching Survivor.
This quest for
fire, with lots of Helen Keller arm waving, usually lasts at least 5 minutes,
two minutes of which are spent recovering from rounds of nearly losing my
balance and plummeting to my death. (And of course there’s no one down there to
help break my fall. As soon as I utter the hellish words “It’s time to get the
Christmas stuff out of the attic”, there’s an instantaneous mass exodus from
the house, with relatives and friends and family pets fleeing for their lives,
scampering to hide behind bushes and trees and startled neighbors,
communicating via walkie-talkie until all agree that the risk of returning is
minimal.)
It’s just me and
the mice droppings. Alone again, naturally.
And when I
finally locate the light chain and pull on it with the exasperated fury of a
Kardashian who doesn’t yet have her own designer cologne or country, casting a
weak light on the contents of the Hell Above Our Heads? Boxes. Boxes from here
to China in all directions. Towers of
boxes. If you need to hide from the po-po, just head up here, and your story
will someday appear on Unsolved Mysteries.
To be fair, most
of this mess is my own doing. As some of you know, I have an obsession with
setting out a Christmas Village every year. (You can read some of the sordid
details here.) I’ve toned it down a bit for the past few years, but there was a
long stretch where my madness for acquiring miniature real estate knew no
boundaries, with me snapping up tiny houses with a feverish intensity that
nearly, and should have, led to an intervention. Or an exorcism. Something.
But even though I
acknowledge 97% of the responsibility for the fact that there isn’t a single
inch of available floor space in the attic (2 of the 712 boxes have things in
them that are not mine, which therefore means that I am not alone in my
transgressions and thusly everyone shares in the guilt, even the cats, who own
nothing up here), it doesn’t mean I can’t fuss about it. So I do.
I whine as I’m
flat on my belly, my body contorted unnaturally as I stretch for a box of
must-use ornaments that have been shoved into a far corner for some ungodly
reason, a tiny space where even Jiminy Cricket wouldn’t be able to wear his top-hat,
yet the box has been crammed in there somehow. I whine as I stumble-fall down
the ladder under the weight of an enormous tub that has 50 rolls of
after-Christmas bargain wrapping paper in it. I whine as I’m lying face-down on
the couch hours later, my body wracked with spasming muscles that haven’t been
used in 11 months, half-heartedly listening to the all-clear alert that has
been sounded in the neighborhood so my family can return home.
2. That stupid
wrapping paper in the stupid enormous tub.
We have three of
those tubs. Well, at least three that I can identify in a police line-up. (Since
I’ve pulled back on my Christmas Village display, from a time when I used to
cover an entire 20x40 room down to just a subsection of that abused room, I don’t
even use a big chunk of the boxed houses in the attic anymore. There are stacks
of houses that haven’t even been inventoried in years. It certainly wouldn’t
surprise me to walk (crawl?) around one of those stacks and discover Amelia
Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa having tea.)
Anyway, the
wrapping paper. We have more than we could possibly use for the next 50 years.
We could wrap a fleet of Buicks in foil paper and not even make a dent in the
stock. And I’m not talking about the pointless rolls of paper, the kind where
you can only wrap two CD’s and you’re already down to the cardboard tube. Nope,
these are the industrial rolls, where a single roll could repave all the
streets in my neighborhood and you’d still have enough left over to papier-mâché
the Statue of Liberty. Big. Ass. Rolls.
How did this
happen, you ask? Well, there’s a two-fold answer. Exhibit A is the fact that I
lose control when they first introduce the new wrapping-paper designs each
holiday season. I’m fully aware that we already have enough wrapping paper that
activists concerned about the Brazilian rainforest have started an online
petition to have me placed in lock-up for the last three months of each year.
But I still can’t
help myself. When I see the shiny new patterns and designs, there are always
several that I must have, even if somebody has to get hurt in the process. So I
snag the ones I want and throw them into the shopping cart, next to the suntan
lotion because the start of the retail Christmas season has officially been
moved to Independence Day. Then I lug my purchases home and throw them in a tub
and no one ever sees them again. Except possibly Amelia and Jimmy.
Exhibit B has two
perpetrators, myself and my partner. (He’s very tight with his money, never
paying full price for anything unless a court order is involved, so he can
resist the pre-Christmas temptation of paying 86 dollars for two designer sheets
of wrapping paper.) But once Santa has gone back to the North Pole where he can
live with hundreds of small boys and no one asks questions about it? Well, we’re
both on the post-sales like crack-heads in the flour aisle at Piggly Wiggly.
How can you NOT
buy something when it’s super cheap and you might possibly use it before the
end of the century? That’s just un-American. When a roll of paper the size of a
cheddar wheel has been slashed to fifty cents, that puppy is going in the
basket, even if the design printed on the paper is a little questionable and
clashes with the tree decorations and everything else in the house.
Moral of the
story? We never use most of that discount paper. A few rolls, yes, on gifts for
those relatives where you are obligated to get them a little something but you
really don’t care for them and your heart isn’t in it (don’t lie, we all have
those kinfolk), so you end up shoving their present to the back of the tree in
that mystery zone where you eventually always find that one present that no one
claims to have wrapped, with a name tag of somebody you don’t know. (“Aunt
Charlene? Who the hell is Aunt Charlene? Anybody?”)
Crickets chirp.
3. The Tree of
Pain
There was a time
when I was equally divided between having a “live” Christmas tree and an artificial
one. Live trees are pretty swell, I love the smell of them and the uniqueness
of each tree. Downside? The damn needles that fall off constantly, of course,
ending up from one end of the house to the other, aided and abetted by pets who
are religiously convinced that these needles must be shared with the world and
the bare feet that walk upon it.
Oh, and we mustn’t
forget the watering angle. This is not a particularly taxing aspect of
live-tree nurturing, but a healthy tree can suck up gallons of liquid before it
realizes that its days are numbered, and it can be quite easy to forget to keep
an eye on the bucket of nourishment neath the tree. And when you do forget, two
horrid things happen: One, the tree can become so dried out that someone
lighting a cigarette at the convenience store two blocks over can inadvertently
cause your house to burn down. And two, those damn needles are no longer pliant
and less able to pierce the skin. They are now hardened spikes that qualify for
regulation by government authorities.
Now, a fake tree
is no walk in the park, by any means. First off, there’s the misconception
about the box that it comes in. That box is only adequate storage for the tree
parts for a very limited amount of time, namely the duration of the trip from
the store where you bought it to your house. Once you slice the binding tape on
said box, the Christmas music playing in the background should change to the
soundtrack from The Exorcist.
Because that tree
is never going to fit in that box again. Ever.
Try as you might,
it’s just not going to happen. Sure, the first year, you might get most of the
parts back into the original receptacle. You’ll sweat your ass off doing so,
but the tree has not yet learned that you are its bitch and is still mostly
cooperative.
Within two years
you can only get half of the tree parts in the box. Within four, the whole
process is pointless. The box now has the consistency of wet toilet paper,
ripping apart if you breathe on it, and the only thing that fits in the box is
the tree stand, and that thing has
lost a critical turn screw (the cat denies involvement, but you know that
Fluffy has lied in the past during interrogations) and you might as well throw
the stand away. Or at least into the stack of older, rusty stands that have also
disappointed their parents.
The turning point
for me? The invention of the pre-lit artificial tree.
This was a sign
that there is a god of some kind, a caring god, one that does not want his/her
children to suffer through the mind-wrecking ordeal of stringing lights on a
Christmas tree, a horrendous task that the World Health Organization should ban
based on the number of divorces and voluntary commitments to insane asylums
that have resulted from a burnt-out bulb that cannot be found.
So it’s been
pre-lits for me ever since. You simply connect the various parts of the tree
together (using the instruction manual, written by someone making two cents an
hour and who really doesn’t know any other English than “Lady Gaga”), connect
the various electrical plugs (which can be a bit tricky, since you will initially
encounter more female plugs than male plugs, something that historically only
happens on the island of Lesbos or at the Dinah Shore Invitational, but keep at
it and things will balance out), and then shove the main plug into a socket
that hopefully has the blessing of the local chapter of the IBEW.
Et voila! Pretty
lights without the need for attorneys and restraining orders.
Now, the pre-lit
does not get my full love and support. It’s still an artificial tree, and as
such, it is subject to the new tree-fabrication technology that allows these
things to be manufactured in a manner where the various branches have been so
tightly wound together that it looks like a small shrub on the conveyor belt in
the factory located in a country that does not recognize things like a minimum
wage that actually means anything.
This production
process allows the tree to be nestled in a box that you will never use again.
It also means that you must now “fluff” the tree, once it has been released in
your home.
Fluffing =
misery. It takes forever to pry the little branch-lets away from the main
branch. And you can’t screw around with this prying. You have to shape and mold
each little tendril or your tree will look like road-kill. This means that,
even though you got the Express Pass with the “not having to string lights”
angle, you must still spend a considerable amount of time with the fluffing.
Hours and hours. Long enough that by the time you are finished, everyone else
has gone to bed.
Except the cat.
The cat who has been eyeing your handiwork for most of the evening, waiting for
that sublime moment when you quit jacking with the tree and walk away in
defeat, seeking counseling and hopefully prescription tranquilizers. Once you
leave the room, the cat will leap on the tree, claw its way to the top, chew
off the top third of the tree, and then knock the rest of it over for you to
find in the morning when all you really wanted to find was a bagel and some
coffee….
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