Cursed Tongue: All Drecked Out

Posted by CursedTongue on December 23, 2006

Last week I was enthusiastic about my plan to put no Christmas decorations outside of my house whatsoever. I had absolutely no desire to put up a tasteful holiday display. No twinkle lights strewn over my rock “riverbed,” no inflatable light-up snow globe or NASCAR Santa; not so much as a sprig of rash-inducing mistletoe.

It isn’t as if I had a good excuse for my aspirations of holiday shirking. Living in Arizona, I don’t even have the bad weather excuse. There is no snow, or ice, or sleet like millions of tiny razorblades. There aren’t even that many cloudy days. And honestly, it probably wouldn’t be me up there on the ladder.

It would be my husband, because it makes him nervous when I’m around heights and tools. I’ve stepped on nails, stapled myself and smashed enough fingers with hammers to earn myself the Klutzy Disaster Overachievers Award on a regular basis.

Building sets in High School Drama Club I managed to single-handedly destroy the school’s immaculate safety record. (I was given a paintbrush, and told not to touch anything pointy.) The only reason I’ve never severed a finger, is that I don’t work with anything sharper than a screwdriver on a regular basis.

But a few days ago, the neighbors across the street spent a sunny afternoon hanging icicle lights and wreaths. The gravity of the situation didn’t hit me until I opened my door after sunset and walked out to see the elegantly lit house taunting me from directly across the street. I felt guilt of Christmas Slacking sink into my skin like mist.

I’d like to tell you that I’m not one of those people who keeps track of neighbors and covets lead crystal punch bowls, BMWs and silk drapes. I’d like to tell you that I don’t ooh and ahh over the professionally designed landscaping in people’s front yards and roll my eyes at the painfully awkward did-it-themselves rock gardens with lovely assortments of dying foliage. I can tell you that I haven’t gone into debt over my sick, sick craving to one-up the Joneses. I like to think this means I don’t have a problem. At least not one requiring a twelve-step program.

But yesterday, (despite my strict religious beliefs of never carrying a credit card balance) I found myself lingering over the strings of Christmas lights, shiny new and neatly wrapped so as to fit in their boxes on the shelves at Target. I felt compelled to buy lights – hundreds and hundreds of lights and a wicker, light wrapped polar bear with life-like motion.

I wouldn’t usually even consider making a major decorating decision without my husband’s input on the matter (whether or not I decide to completely ignore it), especially about Christmas, which has lost a lot of its charm as far as I’m concerned, what with being the designated corresponder in our little family. But here I was. Drooling over the LEDs, the old fashioned bulbs, and the miniature Italian twinkle lights, like a kid with her nose pressed to the window of a toy store.

Mission accomplished for the advertisers hocking Christmas and “The Holiday Season.” I felt panic as the pressures of Christmas constricted my throat. Added to the usual list of ornament fetching, tree decoration, gift purchasing, and card writing was gussying up the front of my house like an unholy little wedding chapel in Vegas.

And I realized, standing in the path of an angry looking woman behind a cart laden with Bratz Dolls and garland, I felt simultaneously drawn and repelled by the lights. Do I move out of the way for the angry woman and forget about decorating? Or do I glare back at her and pile my basket with a half dozen boxes of lights?

It occurred to me, in my precarious, fence-like position, that Charles Dickens wrote a song about my Bah Humbug spirit. Want to hear it? Here it goes, “Oh but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge; a squeezing grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner; hard and sharp as flint from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret and self-contained; and solitary as an oyster.”

What I needed was a good Christmas story, or movie, preferably with Patrick Stewart in the role of Scrooge. I don’t need to show my Christmas spirit to the neighborhood. I could be Scrooge. I’m good at being Scrooge. I don’t really want to tart up my house with red and green sparkles, like a stripper who calls herself Candy Cane for the month of December and then goes back to Madison or Taylor. And besides, there is enough light pollution in the area with out me putting in my two watts.

- Sarah Letnes

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Tags: christmas, humor

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