TRIMMING
Cindy Maddera
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I've had an ear worm playing in my brain since November twenty eighth. It's that "Trim Up the Tree" song from How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I may just be in the mood to trim up a tree with bingle balls. The problem is we lack the space for my vintage sparkly aluminum Christmas tree and I'm nervous about getting out some of my Christmas ornaments. Michael and the Cabbage are not the type that go gently through the night. I am still at times amazed that someone so small can walk so loudly. I just have a vision of some of those ornaments smashed into millions of pieces from wayward limbs and shaking floors. There's a few that are irreplaceable and then I remember that time we went to retrieve our Christmas ornaments from our old house and found all of our ornaments smashed to smithereens. My beautiful Babar ornament was nothing but shiny dust. I've rebuilt my ornament collection since then, even finding the same Babar ornament, but I'm scared of a repeat disaster. Yet I still want to hang some pantookas.
Last weekend I made us a new wreath for the door. A few days ago, I designed and ordered our Christmas cards. I have yet to hang up our stockings or figure out the tree situation. I'm moving in slow motion mostly because I am indecisive. We can't do live trees if you want me to live through Christmas without suffocating from swollen sinuses and scratching my skin off because of hives. Do I go with the super tiny tree we used last year? Or do I talk myself into a new medium sized tree that would tuck away into a corner a bit easier than the aluminum tree I have now? What about that pre-lit tree Chris and I used one time in the house on Mallard? Does this mean I need more Christmas lights and ribbon? Those Whos have it easy. All of their Christmas shit is strung together so that they just have to toss it up in the air and it lands Christmas side up. If only it were really that easy.
After looking at trees at Target, I decided that I didn't want to spend fifty bucks on a new tree. This meant that I had to dig in the basement for that pre-lit tree that I knew that I had somewhere because I was raised by Southern women and Southern women always have back-up trees for their back-up trees. I opened the storage box to see that a container of silver glitter had managed to bust open and fill the corners of the box with glitter so when I pulled out the tree and let the limbs flop down, glitter spilled out onto the floor. We have glitter every where. Festive. Once I got the tree together, Michael and I agreed that it was too short and needed to sit on something. So we found a small table (a box) and covered it with a sheet. I plugged in the lights and Viola! Only the bottom half of the tree was lit. I don't know if any of you have a pre-lit Christmas tree or have seen how they kind of work. There's like twenty plugs (really four) and they all plug into each other is some daisy chain (dirty) fashion and all of the plugs are located near the center of the tree. You have to fight your way through plastic limbs to get to everything and I think it's very much like disarming a bomb. One bloody knuckle and a band-aid later I decided that this tree looked fine with just the two strings of LED lights I ended up stringing around the tree.
But the tree is up! We each did several test stomps through the dining room to the kitchen to make sure that the tree would actually stay up and well...it looks like we have a Christmas tree. The Cabbage helped me hang ornaments and she set my Abominable Snowman at the base of the tree. I hung up Babar near the top of the tree and plugged my Christmas trailer into a blue light (blue light special). The Christmas gods have smiled upon us and behold! We have a Christmas tree! Literally decorated with blood and sweat. It's enough to shut up all those Whos because they've stopped singing their holly jolly decorating tune.
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Even though I still haven't hung the stockings.