Holidays start with crash (12/1/03)

I have broken my first Christmas decoration of the year. A reindeer smacked a Santa snow globe and shattered it. I have no idea what the reindeer had against Santa, but I swear it smirked when the glass broke.

The snow globe was beyond repair and went into the trash for some future archeologist to discover in a landfill several centuries from now. The reindeer was placed high on a shelf where it could look down on all the other decorations but not get close enough to any of them to attack. I’m not sure why it is feeling so aggressive this year.

It has been a bad month for reindeer. I have a set of eight tiny reindeer that are always a bit cranky about pulling Santa’s sleigh. Some years they hide the reins so that Santa can’t get off the ground. Some years they even hide the sleigh. This year one of them, I think it was Dancer, had to have its antlers glued back on. Prancer and Vixen have yet to put in an appearance. Maybe they saw what happened to the snow globe and are afraid to come out into the open.

The reindeer will have to behave now that the nativity has been set up. I can’t imagine the holy family putting up with all the shenanigans of a cranky animal when their precious baby is trying to sleep. They always look so peaceful when I unwrap them but they had to be strong to raise the son of God.

I like to stretch out the decorating process over several weeks. It makes it seem more like Christmas if I still have decorations to hang and presents to buy. I’m never quite finished until late on Christmas eve.

The last thing to appear is the tree. We used to wait until December 24 to purchase a tree.

Part of the reason we waited is because my daughter would come home for Christmas, and she never arrived more than a day or two ahead of time. I always enjoyed shopping for a tree with her. Last year when we went to her place for Thanksgiving we bought her tree the day after Thanksgiving. She doesn’t procrastinate like her mother does.

The other reason I wait so long is that I am cheap. For many years I didn’t pay more than five dollars for a tree. It doesn’t matter that by Christmas eve the only trees left are flat on one side. That’s what walls are for. Nobody will see the back of the tree anyway. Really scraggly trees go in a corner. I have some oversized ornaments to fill in any gaping holes that can’t be hidden by a wall.

I was cured of waiting until the last minute to purchase a tree the year I bought one that Charlie Brown would have been proud of. No amount of backing it into a corner or loading it with decorations could disguise the fact that it was one pathetic-looking conifer. No wonder it was the last one on the lot.The worst part was that it was our turn to have Christmas at our house that year. In addition to being ugly the creature was also short. The only saving grace was that the pile of presents was higher than the tree. It made it look like we had spent more than we actually had.

We all have our favorite rituals for the holidays. Prolonging the shopping and decorating and buying really ugly trees is one of my rituals. The one year I had everything finished by the second week in December it just didn’t feel like Christmas. So I go home every night and unearth a wreath or some other decoration and prolong the pleasure of the season.

In a couple of weeks I’ll go shopping for a lopsided evergreen. Until then my mission is to get the decorations to quit destroying each other.

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