I’m pleased to note
that my household Christmas preparations and traditions
are marching along this year with uncharacteristic ease.
It hasn’t always been so. I’ve been married almost ten
years, and my husband and I are finally reaching a point
where we don’t have to argue about every little Christmas
knick-knack. It’s a good thing, too, because the kids are
old enough to notice.
If you’re lucky (as was I), your first
married years are spent in a chemical froth, so you don’t
really mind compromising over unimportant little things
like whether lights twinkle or not. After all, you’re
"playing house", and the whole point is to pretend you’re
a cooperative unit, rather than two intensely opinionated
horses’ rears. But then (around Christmas number three)
reality sets in, and you realize that you ARE, in fact,
just that.
I’m sure the details differ from family
to family. The first major issue for us was "When to get
the tree". Thanksgiving, or Christmas Eve?
Differing opinions on the pros and cons
of LIVE trees is probably the primary reason that the
birth rate routinely drops in late September. When I was a
kid, not only had I never SEEN an artificial Christmas
tree, I had no idea that there were VARIETIES of live
ones. Christmas tree: Douglas Fir. Period. There is simply
NO easy compromise here, unless you trade off victories,
meaning that whoever wins on the tree issue gets to climb
the 2nd story eaves to hang lights. Then go back up and
re-do them on account of you can’t just replace a burnt
bulb with ANY color – it has to be the same as the
burnt-out one!
Our difficulties continued in short
order with a war over tinsel. I won’t point any fingers,
but SOMEBODY’S Mother, apparently, was a tinsel fanatic.
And despite the fact that it’s incredibly tacky and kills
cats (which might to some miscreants be considered a
perk), that somebody doesn’t care to see reason.
<continued below>
Front yard decorations are another
touchy point, and may actually be responsible for a large
percentage of divorces. Not necessarily because of
disagreements, but because a husband, on his way home from
work, may pass by his home many times without recognizing
it – and get accused of all sorts of terrible dalliances.
I might argue that the little ceramic
houses we line up on the mantle needn’t NECESSARILY be in
the same configuration every year (arranged
alphabetically). But in my house, I’d be wrong. Which
isn’t an incredible leap, since (among other things) I’d
just assumed that EVERYBODY had a 4 foot corrugated
cardboard Santa…
My husband might think that bleached sea
urchin carcasses look a little silly hanging from a tree,
but he’s wise enough to keep it to himself. He once dissed
my angel flag (I was 8 months pregnant at the time, which
means he was pretty much toast.)
I was puzzled, for years, about his
adoration of poinsettias – a plant I had no particular
feelings for one way or other. I mean, how many of those
things do you NEED, anyway? But he kept bringing them
home, two by two. Eventually I warmed up to them. And
that, I think, was the turning point.
So many years we spent squandering
tidbits of Christmas joy in a desperate attempt to hang on
to the traditions we thought held the secret. Two exacting
personalities, at odds over the likes of a Santa mug or
paper chain. What we never saw, never even suspected, was
our own parents’ consternation, ironing out their own
holiday differences for our benefit. Setting us up for
disaster by having cleverly found middle ground before we
caught on that there might, just possibly, be more than
one RIGHT way.
Maybe, after all, that’s the whole POINT
of mistletoe.
