December, It Can Be A Pain in the Ass

It was not an unusual thing to hear cursing during December as the stress of being Santa Claus to our larger than average clan got to my father. You could come away from that experience with two different views of Christmas. Either you’d try to create the most perfect holiday for your family, unlike the nightmares that sometimes came out of my dads temper, or like me, you try to play the holiday down.

My tactic has always been to make Christmas fun without the hassle of actually doing much. Instead of running around like a crazy person I’d just go to my brother’s or sister’s homes. This would require no decorating of my house, or even cleaning of it. I have almost never had family over for the holidays. This pretty much changed when Mark and I got together. Mark likes to have the house all decked out, and of course he also likes the ‘gay’ apparel part, which has turned me totally against Christmas. To me it just means work and spending money for crap that nobody needs. At some point I just rebel, like when he used to make me string lights all over the front of the house. One year I just left them up there after Christmas and the next year plugged them in again. They finally came down when I had the roof redone two years later.

My routine for Christmas now, is for me to hang one string of lights across the front porch from nails that I have permanently left out there. Then I go to the shed and pull out the fake tree. After spraying it with a good coating of bug spray to kill the ants that have set up home in it, I drag it into the house one piece at a time. At this point it is totally up to Mark what happens. Usually he decorates it beautifully all by himself, but this year he has left it lying right where I dropped it three days ago, before I sat down to watch the Bears lose. I assume he will, at some point, put it up and decorate it, or maybe Christmas will come and go before he realizes it and I'll just return it to the shed.