The Tree Has Left the Building

Beren deMotier * writer * artist * human

THE TREE HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

I am pleased to announce the tree has left the building. I have enjoyed another glorious holiday season.

Without killing anyone.

And I’m not one of those “I-Hate-Christmas-it’s-all-a-commercial-racket-the-Grinch-was-right” kind of people either. I love the whole thing, really I do, but even if you’re a ho ho fan, and I’d go so far as to call myself a Christmaholic, between the baking, the shopping, the wrapping, the visiting, the cleaning, the Napoleonic making of plans, it’s enough to get anyone committed.

Of course in our case it’s complicated by the fact that we don’t live in a nice, controllable, convenient, modern apartment where cleaning is something you do with a quick vacuum and a bottle of Windex. We had to get an older house (read “fixer upper”) with lots of room. For mess. You name it, there’s stuff there.

We’ve also blessed our lives with two lovable children who come down with something, like clockwork, starting the day before any vacation time my wife has, and miraculously return to good health the day before she has to go back to work. It’s generally something serious enough to make us anxious but not so serious as to distract us entirely from all the things we’re not accomplishing on our Virgo lists or are missing due to our own personal household plague.

And on top of that we feel compelled to further complicate our lives by entertaining non-stop (between illnesses) during the holidays and not hole up in a cabin in Vermont like any intelligent soul.

There were high points, of course. Like when our four year old son brought his baby sister’s Christmas stocking to her before he even peeked in his own. Like knowing that I’d gotten all the shopping done and there were still days until Christmas. Like when they remembered to say thank you without cue cards.

And then there were the low points.

I’m standing in the kitchen, staring at a pile of dishes and kitchen debris, it’s one o-clock in the morning, the baby has nursed for three hours straight because she feels rotten, we’ve baked cookies, had a fight and talked to both sets of grandparents and find out they have both scheduled us for events which conflict with each other and neither is prepared to back down. My eyes lite upon the cans and bottles all needing prepping for the recycling bin. I weigh my choices, recycle, nervous-breakdown, recycle, nervous-breakdown... and decide there are special indulgences granted for such occasions. I open the garbage lid and begin dumping.

So much for political correctness.

And then there’s the strain of maintaining a split-personality. Every holiday it’s the same, and much of the rest of the year. How do I appreciate and enjoy the good parts of family relations, accepting their love for me as an individual while knowing that they would probably prefer my kind simply didn’t occur in God’s green land? Can I be big enough to see their perspective and just be glad to be included, i.e. learn to love second-class citizenship, while maintaining an internal self-esteem which is sufficiently strong but not so Herculean that it leaps on the dining table while Uncle Joe is carving the turkey and erupts into a long-winded and erudite speech on why the denial of gay marriage is unjust.

Tempting, isn’t it?

The culmination of this month of madness came for me on Christmas Eve morning when a black cloud enveloped me and I knew I would surely die since I had nothing decent to wear and we were due in roughly twenty minutes for a family gathering that I was actually looking forward to. The kids looked like a Gap ad, the wife was showered and dressed, but I sat like Pooh in his thoughtful spot having an Eeyore sort of day. As I tried to brace myself for the search for something suitable yet true to my irreverent nature, I was filled with despair for the loss of the magic of Christmas, the loss of childhood, the fact that we were hoping this would be the year we could afford to buy each other Christmas presents (the wife and I) instead of just for the kids, and it wasn’t.

Oh I knew I was being illogical and selfish. And that my wife was wondering where the Aliens had put her real partner. Which didn’t help. And besides absolutely nothing went with the skirt I’d whipped up the night before from an old dress except things that belong to my wife and she abhors it when I wear her clothes.

Bless her heart she recognized that I’d become unhinged and offered me anything, including the shirt off her back, which was the shirt which went best so I accepted. Crisis averted, we had a lovely time.

So in keeping with my avoiding nature, I’m making a New Year’s resolution which I don’t have to make good on for another ten months or so. I resolve to bake fewer Christmas cookies, make the children take vitamins months in advance, not have the annual fight while we decorate the tree, buy a new outfit that I know works well before December twenty-fourth, not try to raise any consciousness during the last quarter of the calendar year, and if at all possible, buy plane tickets to Vermont.