Weekend of Trees

I really think ya’ll have the wrong impression of me. Just because I am not a fan of starting the Christmas season sometime before Labor Day does not mean that I am a Scrooge. I enjoy the holidays as much as the next person. (Because both me and the next person know that Scrooges don’t get nearly as many presents as jolly people.) I enjoy spending time with my friends and family during the holidays and I appreciate that it is a time for people to reconnect and share gifts and jingle the occasional bell. But I really don’t see what 24 hours a day of the same 5 Christmas songs on my light rock station have to do with my reconnecting with the people I love. Or with me getting presents. If you could convince me that hearing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” sung by 4 different singers will increase my gift procurement I might be more open to the repeated sounds of the season.

This weekend I was forced to allow the Christmas spirit into my home via a large pine tree and many a twinkly light. My roommate and I decorated the house amidst the sounds of the 24-hour Christmas station and me repeatedly saying, “Seriously, I don’t like eggnog, I don’t know why you are insisting that I drink it.” But I gotta admit, the house looks adorable. I gotta admit it because my roommate repeatedly threatened to tell the blogworld about my secret love for the holidays. I had found my antlers from last year, was wearing Christmas socks that my cousin gave me and was even belting out the occasional carol. The Roommate said, “See! I KNEW you secretly liked the holidays! It must be the color of your hair.” (This was in response to my proclaiming her blond and as a result generally more inclined to be positive about all things, including the holidays.)

We did hit one minor snag when decorating the house. We needed a hammer to assist in hanging lights in the window. Last year we had two hammers for this process. This year we could find none. I got out my tool box which had an obscene number of nails, but no hammer. The Roommate looked through all of her stuff – no hammer. I did manage to find a socket wrench though and it became our rather ghetto excuse for a hammer. Then, about halfway through the hanging process, as The Roommate balanced between a table and the window sill she screamed, “Oh!” I immediately grabbed her legs, thinking that she was falling. When no falling happened I looked up to see what she was Oh-ing about and there, sitting on the window sill – the hammer. Still sitting there from when we hung the lights last year. We don’t do a lot of home maintenance throughout the year, as it turns out.

The second part of my Weekend O’ Christmas Trees came on Sunday when I went to an annual local show called The Singing Christmas Tree. Do you guys have anything like this show where you live? It’s basically a big-ass tree-looking thing with a bunch of singers sitting in it. They sing all the big songs of the season while dancers and cute kids perform. It’s all very festive. It takes place at a big church in town and I’m pretty sure that every member of the church gets to be in the show. At one point a line of people came in from the back of the theater, walked down the aisle, walked across the stage, walked off the stage, back up the other aisle and exited out the back of the theater. This line continued for the course of an entire song. We had kids dressed like snowflakes and cupcakes and candy canes and letters to Santa and angels and wisemen and camels. All onstage for approximately 3.2 seconds each. “Keep the adorable moving! We got baby Jesus waiting in the wings to save our souls!”

Then for the next song every teenager from Northern California came out onstage and performed a hip hop Christmas song. I found this all quite amusing. There must have been five rows of at least 25 kids each. Out of all those kids there were about 3 black kids. Those three black kids were in the front row, with the few white kids who had any hope of rhythm. The rest of the kids were kinda hidden in the back, only allowed to clap and sway a little.

So, let’s recap shall we? This weekend I wore antlers, drank eggnog and watched an overweight bald man do a ballet-like dance to I’ll Be Home For Christmas in front of a huge ass Christmas tree that had people instead of ornaments. If anyone calls me a Scrooge again I’m going to hit them with my rediscovered hammer.