The Holiday House or The Inconveniences of Christmas
Monday, December 1st, 2008
Each window is lit by soft electric candles separated from the curtains by small toilet paper rolls. This sacrifice, for safety sake, is a small one and not at all evident to anyone passing by the house on the sidewalk or by car. While it’s not entirely attractive or particularly festive, the small cardboard tubes keep the cloth window dressings from standing against the hot bulbs and catching aflame.
There are many inconveniences in a house this size with as many occupants as there are now. Some are direct products of the holiday season while the others are continual nuisances. The additions since last Christmas do not include any new children, but there is a new dog – a third – gotten sometime in February. Apparently the memory of holiday funds squandered and the newness of recent gifts quickly wore off.
There is also a new cat – a kitten, which I suppose is an entirely different animal than a more aged feline. Stripe is only a few months old, fully clawed and a pain that wakes me every morning at 4:30 by wrapping his tail under my nose so I must choose death by suffocation or actually rise to fill his food bowl. At that hour, it can be a tough choice, only the death I contemplate is not my own.
Nearly every surface in the house is covered with some Christmas ornament or garland, or, if it’s the work desk in the kitchen, a bill already waiting from buying presents earlier in the year or a payment delayed because of those purchases. The piano top, the ornamental wood above the front door, the end tables and armoire are layered with decor. Against the front windows, another glow is cast from the bushes wrapped with white lights.
The little sappling left naked from fall is now fully clothed in matching bulbs. And inside, the Christmas tree has to be seen to be fully beheld. We have friends who made it a point one year to buy and assemble a plastic Christmas tree resembling one you might see at the Pottery Barn, complete with matching balls – all red and silver – and nothing more.
Our tree is the very antithesis to that sort of approach and could possibly send someone preferring the former into convulsions from its sheer randomness and disorganization. Almost every inch is dangled with ornaments ranging from the traditional berry strings and ribbons to super hero picture frames, Van Halen balls and Scrooge and Bob Cratchett figures. My wife’s baby photo hangs in one piece obviously held over from the 1970s.
I am not so sure how this tree fits into our concept of the holidays. It is certainly not the type of tree that we envision when thinking of Christmas, but it’s our tree. It has personality and sufficently covers the presents set under it every year.
For every incovenience, though, there are benefits that pay off at home and abroad. Our youngest daughter who yells from the backseat, “Daddy, look at the lights” at every house we pass that is decorated for the season, a house filled with sweet baking smells, and a real togetherness – the manifestation of love, it could be interpreted – that accompanies the smiles and the presents and the excitement.
This is who we are at Christmas time – a family, foremost – seen in a collection of faces and memories on display in those false but beautiful branches. The fact that the tree and its appropriations block the path from the stairs to the kitchen only draws anyone near it closer to the holiday spirit.
