Season's Bleatings

Since the major media outlets seem to have missed it, forgive me for pausing to wish myself a happy blogiversary... Tuesday marked 2 years of filling up this space every week or so. Unfortunately I was unable to celebrate in print, because I was busy living a blog.

Regardless of the obvious charms of this Most Wonderful Time of the Year (not limited to the Andy Williams rendition),there are aspects of this season that are somewhat less generously suffused with Joy to the World. For you this may include the weather, or the shopping, or the ubiquitous song about a grandparent in trouble that dare not speak its name (did you know that the "Elmo" of "Elmo & Patsy" is actually Dr. Elmo? Eleven months of the year, a mild-mannered dentist; the other, he's like Springsteen or something. Although a more apt comparison might be Rick Dees, or even moreso Bobby "Boris" Pickett).

For me, however, the bane of my seasonal existence -- in a close call over that song, and it's too late & it's already stuck in my head and oh, please, Lord, won't you put me out of my misery? -- is Tree Day.

Putting up the Christmas tree is one of those Currier & Ives / Norman Rockwell-type images, and I always thought of it as just one of those things a man's supposed to be able to do -- like changing a tire, fixing stuff around the house, or carving a turkey. Over the years, however, the tree and I have faced off in a series of epic battles.

Once it's found, bought & gotten home, the real fun begins. Now the Experts say you're supposed to cut a little off the bottom; this helps it "drink" better, stay fresher, and not drop all its needles in a big heap on your rug until next week. This frankly poses a dilemma for me. First, it's my wife that has the cool tools, and she leaves them at camp. I, on the other hand, have a saw with a plastic handle and interchangeable blades that my I think my dad bought for me at W.T Grant in about 1975. In a sense, it's the perfect implement for the occasion, since I shouldn't be allowed to have sharp objects when I'm in this kind of mood.

To be honest, better tools wouldn't clinch it for me. Let's just say that back in Junior High, I did better in Bachelor Living (managing to be both a euphemism for and a stereotype of Home Ec) than I did in Shop. Of course, I really had no chance going in -- a shop full of heavy/sharp objects, populated to a large degree with the ... less academically aggressive students ... is not a safe place for a skinny and unpopular "new kid" with glasses, suspected (with some justification) of being a geek.

I'm always wary of whether the tree will balance & stay vertical, so I also use the trunk-trim as a way to level out the bottom as well. This is more effective when I don't cut the wrong direction, as I did a couple years ago. I ended up basically wedging that cut back under the trunk like a doorstop.

That's also why I gave up on the old-fashioned metal tripod stand and got one of those enormous bucket-like plastic ones. The advantage to that is that if worse comes to worst, I can just throw away the tree and decorate the stand, since it's pretty tall all by itself. It's so deep that I had to put a wood block in the bottom to prop up the tree. It took me like a half-hour to scrape such a block out of a scrap 2x4 piece (beavers would've been quicker)... only to find at last that the "well" of the stand is wider at the top than at the bottom, so I had to hack off yet another piece.

Finally, I got the tree essentially upright (I told my wife the reason it looked like it was leaning was that "the trunk isn't straight") and brought it in the house. I was so enervated from the tussle that it's taken me the 2 days since to even get lights on it -- which also ranks well below my top-10 fave holiday chores.

For some reason, I've found myself listing at about 5 degrees from vertical since I started working on the tree. Finally I gave up and admitted to myself that the tree was somewhat less than vertical (Step One: We admitted that we were powerless over shrubbery). It was way too late to try to reset it in the stand, so I did the next best thing.

I took the piece I sliced off the end of my original block and stuck it under the edge of the stand, tipping the stand up & making the tree look reasonably plumb. If you come to visit us over the next few weeks, I hope you enjoy our festive decor -- but please close the front door very gently.