By now, I’m sure most of you have your Christmas tree and home decorations up. Not me – I’m a world class procrastinator. Think I’m kidding? I still have a rotten jack o’lantern on my front porch. Of course, soon I will be forced to give in to my wife’s persistent requests (aka nagging), and begin hauling up boxes from the basement to make our house a quaint holiday home – for about three weeks when it all goes back in the boxes again.
At the risk of sounding like Scrooge, all of this fuss putting out holiday decorations for only three weeks ranks right up there with prepping for a colonoscopy.
The first box I retrieve is the biggest and the worst – the dreaded Christmas tree. Ours comes in several parts which must be assembled just so in order for the lights to work. Then the limbs must be bent out in such a way to avoid “gaps” – the high crime of Christmas tree assembly. Finally, it must be ramrod straight and sturdy, so I end up using books as levelers until it meets the holiday standards.
I feel compelled to point out that in this process I am always labor, and my wife is always management – someone who is all too eager to point out the smallest mistake I make. More likely than not, an argument will break out before we’re finished. That “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” stuff obviously doesn’t apply to husbands and wives putting up Christmas decorations.
However, once I start pulling out the tree decorations, something unusual happens. My dread will slowly give way to fond memories. That’s because each box is like a time capsule from a Christmas past.
For example, I can’t reflect on a lifetime of ornaments without thinking of the first Christmas I had as a married man. My wife and I didn’t have much – certainly not enough to buy a tree full of decorations. So we decided to make them ourselves. Using salt, flour and water we made dough and fashioned some crude holiday figurines that were baked in the oven and painted with cheap acrylic paint.
I’m sure that Martha Stewart would have turned up her nose at my first attempt. Talk about hideous! It was supposed to look like a holiday elf, but instead it came out of the oven looking like a creature from a Stephen King novel. This thing could scare small children. Rather than toss it in the garbage, I painted it grotesque colors and named him Mr. Spock. For many years Spock was a holiday fixture, wedged high on a tree limb because I forgot to put a string hole in his head. He lived long and prosperous for many years until the day he fell to the floor.
During that first holiday season, we did manage to find a box of cheap, plain wooden ornaments. I took them with me on a weeklong sales trip and painted them in my hotel room at night. It was more productive than drinking in a bar, I suppose.
Many of these original, homemade adornments still hang on our tree, along with a lifetime of others, including a collar from my beloved dog Precious, likenesses of Elvis given to me as practical jokes, a wristwatch my father wore and a giant stuffed pheasant that my then 7-year-old granddaughter “bid on” at an auction. There are also lots of primitive decorations our kids made at church and school. Some of them include photos of my boys when they were just boys, which makes me think about the simpler times of years past.
I’ve come to prefer the homemade tree ornaments to the fancy store-bought variety. Each one we make will almost certainly have a narrative connected to it, which is an important part of the holiday season. Believe me, telling a story about an ornament someone made is a heckuva lot better than just saying, “Uh, I bought that one at Wal-Mart.”
Now excuse me. I’ve been told by management that it’s past time to get the big box out of the basement.
Joe Hobby is a barbecue-loving comedian from Alabama who wrote for Jay Leno for many years. Find more of Joe’s stories on his blog: https://mylifeasahobby.blogspot.com. Follow him on Facebook at Joe Hobby Comedian-Writer.
