Deck the Halls

Hey, what could possibly be better than decorating your abode in the spirit of the season??

I can think of a few things.

Like gangrene.

And if you say you like decorating for the holiday, I'm saying that you are lying.

And lying make baby Jesus cry.

Oh, I believe you when you say you enjoy the "thought" of decorating and even that feeling of excited anticipation leading up to the actual day of dressing your house up in a giant version of a Bill Cosby holiday sweater.

But then comes the reality:

The tree's too big.

All forty-three sets of lights left over from last year mysteriously have at least one light on them that is out, which is doubly odd because they were all lit when you put them away and you are reasonably sure that you didn't sneak up to the attic in the heat of July and shake the box like a Polaroid picture so all of the dainty little bulbs would be rattled from the nestling green plastic bosom that holds them. So, now you have to go to the store and battle all the other fucktards that are in the same sinking boat as you and are out trying to buy lights that actually work.

You can't find half the shit you had last year and the stuff you can find is all broken.

Someone stealthly shuts off the football game and puts on the Clay fucking Aiken Christmas album when you turn your back for two seconds to take a piss and ram your head into the wall.

Hey, I can be a jolly ol' elf and God knows I have a belly like a bowl full of jelly, but the decorating part can be a bit...trying.

Take my situation this past weekend. We decided to go get the Christmas decorations from our storage shed. The concept was greeted with pretty much the same amount of trepidation and anxiety as if I heard, "Dim, this catheter is a little too big, but we're gonna try and jam it in there anyway, K?"

So, we trek out to the storage shed and pray that the Christmas decorations practically fall onto my feet the second I open the door.

Instead I open the shed door to find two mountain bikes that have suffered such disuse, it appears that the spider from Stephen King's "It" decided to wrap them up and save them for dinner. By the way, I don't like spiders. That will have more importance later.

I now have to shuffle through boxes of various sizes and shapes that are labeled comprehensively like: "Dim's stuff", "kitchen stuff", "books to sell" (which works out well, because a book mobile usually passes right through our storage shed), "stuff", and "Xteen's stuffed animals"(?!).

Finally, I spy a box labeled in ball point pen (because that shows up really well on cardboard from a distance): "Christmas Decorations". And I must have either been drunk, or overdosed on the quadrillion times they show "A Christmas Story" between Thanksgiving and December 26, because I also wrote "Fra-geel-ay! That's Italian!!!" on the side of the box. It must have been fucking uproarious at the time, but when I saw it, it just made me queasy and made me long to be that drunk again.

This box, marked "fragile"...oh, sorry, "Fra-geel-ay" is lying exactly where you would expect a parcel of highly breakable ornaments would be: Delicately balanced on the top of a perplexingly pyramid shaped box which I'm guessing contains, by the shape of it, a pyramid, though, to the best of my knowledge, we own nothing of such shape.

I grab this this Fra-geel-ay box. It's gotta have some Christmas crap in it.

I find another one. This one's tiny. I open it up. There's like three things in there including this truly creepy looking stuffed Santa Claus (without his freaking HAT) that my mother insists I put out in the apartment because some aunt in the family gave it to us for Xteen's wedding shower and it is, according my Mom, antique roadshow wannabe, "worth a lot of money". And no, the friggin thing wasn't on our registry.

We are both thoroughly convinced that there are more decorations. So I do what any other normal person teetering on the edge of yuletide insanity would do. I whip out a box cutter and proceed to open up boxes labeled: "set of sheets", "tea kettle", and "glassware". I find no other decorations, but instead am the discoverer of a set of sheets, a tea kettle, and glassware. In that order.

I keep trying other boxes until I pick one up and a white spider roughly the size of an atom falls off the box and somewhere near my person. I violently convulse as if 1.21 jigawatts of electricity was shot through my nether regions and a scream of questionably masculinity wretches itself from my body, making a sound that I could only compare to what Ted Turner would sound like if someone grabbed his head and attempted to give him a noogie.

That's it. I'm fine with sifting through boxes of shit, but when I start getting ruthlessly attacked by miniature arachnids, I'm outta there.

We bring our pathetic Christmas booty back to the apartment and start rummaging through the boxes. We find an eerie amount of snow globes and other things wrapped in a wads of tissue paper large enough to choke a mastodon. None of it is particularly interesting.

Now, we locate some larger tree ornaments which will clearly not be appropriate in size for the small, three-foot, fake, PRE-LIT, bitches!, tree I surprised Xteen with earlier in the week. We would put one of these galactic spheres on the tree and it would tip over like Charlie Brown's tree and I don't have Snoopy's commercialism and Linus' Wonder Blanket to come and save the day.

So, I come up with the idea to hang them from these hooks we have throughout the joint. They are hanging from the ceiling and right now are the dangling home to a weird fish sculpture and a mini-velvet Elvis painting. We have a couple of empty hooks, so we put one of the nice ornaments on it. It looks good there. I unwrap another tissue wad to find another similarly-sized ornament. It too, is classy-looking. I proceed to put it on the remaining hook and Xteen takes umbrage.

"That's just too much. I don't want to overdo it. You know how we go into people's houses and it is just cluttered and looks like Santa's Village? I don't want that."

First of all, you're telling me?? I fucking hate decorating! And second of all, it's ONE more ornament! One. It's the size of a naval orange, for crying out loud. When was the last time we were in the store and you were buying naval oranges and you had one in the basket and you reached for another and I said, "Uh, no. That's just too much. I don't want to turn the apartment into an orange orchard, or whatever the fuck they grow in."

So, I finally relent and the ornament doesn't go up. We sit back and see that, in our apartment, we have up a snow globe, a couple of small ceramic things, and the whacked out stuffed Santa Claus with no hat. Clearly, we are bordering on holiday overkill.

There's one particular decoration that I kind of like. It's a Lenox crystal candle holder. It's got holly leaves etched in it and is dual-tune, the top being clear and the bottom is a lovely Christmas green hue. OK, I'm a fairy. Shut up.

Anyway, I can't find it. Until...I spy its box.

I open the thick cardboard box and I find swaddled in its inpenetrable protection (wrapped in a giant wad of tissue paper, natch) a three inch tall wooden nutcracker. You know, the kind they sell 15 for a nickel at your closest holiday supermart. One of those.

Xteen finds the candle holder. Flimsily wrapped in a sheet of mostly popped bubble wrap. By itself and out if its very own box. And the thing is pulverized. Honestly, if you came up to me with a piece of trash and said to me, "Hey, I really want to break this. Can you wrap it up for me, so if I even *think* about it, it will shatter into oblivion?", I'd probably wrap it up like the Lenox crystal candle holder that I really liked was wrapped. I said aloud to the sky, much like Cindy Lou-Who: "Why? Why, Santy Claus? Why?"

Anywho, we couldn't find the Christmas tree ornaments, so I promised Xteen I would go back to the shed on Monday and look again.

Armed with a can of Raid in case that albino spider son of a bitch tried anything funny again, I braved the cold cavity of storage. I proceed to look in boxes that I already looked in two days prior and am surprisingly dumbfounded that the ornaments did not reanimate themselves in places I had searched before.

Then, I spy a box that has none of my writing on it. According to the outside of the box, in words and illustration, it housed a Foodsaver contraption. You know, those things that suck the air out of plastic bags so you can buy meat by the side of cow-load and freeze it all without it going bad. I said to myself, "Hmmm".

I said, "Hmmm" to myself, because I could also say to myself with reasonable certainty that the box was a liar and did not, in fact, provide sanctuary to this air sucking machination because said waste of counter space was currently living in my kitchen wasting counter space.

I cut the overstuffed box open with my razorblade, much like Han Solo, with frightful ease, disembowling a dying Tauntaun with a light sabre on planet Hoth to give a hypothermic Luke warmth. And what did spill out of that box? Not Tauntaun guts! But tree ornaments! Seeing them caused my heart to grow three sizes that day. Pass the roast beast.

So, I get them back to the apartment and when Xteen gets home from work, we put them on our meager tree. But there isn't enough. So, we head down to the local Target to get some more ornaments. I pick one kind over Xteen's choice and we come home with them. And this is where things got dicey.

You see, Xteen thought my balls were too big and I had to convince her that my balls were just small enough to be the perfect size. It turns out that I was right and my balls were small enough. But for some reason, I wish she was right and that my balls were too big. Regardless, my smallish balls are hanging from that tree and I'm going to make sure that everyone who comes over knows it. They might not be the biggest balls on the block. But they're mine and they are hanging quite nicely, thank you very much.

Have fun decorating, fruitcakes!

- Dim.