My Christmas Mea Culpa

This is a pretty long post. (I am long-winded, aren't I?) If you want to read it, you might want to grab yourself a cup of coffee first! lol Here's a newsflash for everyone who knows me: I LOVE CHRISTMAS! I love it, love it, love it! I love the glitter, the sparkle, the sounds, the shopping, the food, the joy, the laughter, the music, the glow....I love it all. I can't get enough of it. But there's one thing I don't like anymore and that's all the work of putting all of our Christmas stuff up. And make no mistake about it. It. Is Work. Now I don't know about the rest of you, but for me...work equals stress. And stress equals crankiness. And crankiness equals me arguing with anyone crazy enough to present me with a problem. That crazy person happened to be Randey this year. Randey really got into decorating the outside of the house this past year. He and the neighbor had a bit of a competition going on (although I think Paula may have gotten the best of him when she bought the Santa's Sleigh Landing Strip Lights. lol). After last Christmas, Randey went and bought more lights. A lot more lights. Great idea, right? Yeah. Except we live in a two story house on a lot that slopes rather sharply on the north side and we also only have 2 electrical outlets on the outside of the house. I don't care who you are, it's just too damn difficult to try and attach lights to the roof line of a two story house with nothing to stand on but a too-short ladder. And can we just stop and think a minute about the safety factor in trying to plug approximately 3500 lights into only 2 outlets? (And if you think I'm being sarcastic here, you should have heard me in person. I was shameful. Truly shameful.) Obviously, these two things...lack of a tall enough ladder and a shortage of electrical outlets, are a problem. Randey, in all his eagerness to get the lights up, didn't take the time to consider these problems. At any time. All year long. From the end of last Christmas until this past weekend, he never sought to obtain a taller ladder and/or scaffolding, nor did he ever call an electrician to see about installing a couple of extra breakers. Lucky for him, he had a very frustrated and overwhelmed wife (that'd be me) who was knee deep in interior Christmas decorations to point out to him just how poorly planned his lighting extravaganza mission was. Oh and I didn't just point it out...I pretty much hammered it in. Why you ask? Well...when my screeching reached a decibel level that has been known to break glass, I stopped and asked myself that same question. Why was I so ticked at him? The answer was very simple. I was overwhelmed with my part of the Christmas decorating and was taking it out on him. Randey's interest in outdoor decorating is fairly new but every year, I'm the one who decorates the inside of our home for Christmas. Randey and the kids would help get the Christmas stuff out of the garage or the attic or wherever it happened to be stored and then I would put it up. It's my fault that I'm the one who always did it. I was a perfectionist. The ornaments has to be put on "just so" and the ribbon garland had to drape, wind and curl at "just the right angles" and the lights had to be put on the tree and in the evergreen garland a certain way. Blah, blah, blah. (Although, in my defense on that one, I did ask Randey to put the lights on the tree one year with instructions to be sure and wrap the lights around and along the branches - you know, deep into the tree! He thought I meant wrap every twig on every branch. That little 6 1/2 foot tree had 1535 lights on it before he was done! lol You could have landed an airplane by it. In fact, it was so bright, we had to put flashers in because it hurt to look at the tree with all the lights on at the same time!). The kids did get to help put the hooks on the ornaments, etc. and, when they got older, they got to help put the ornaments on the tree. But there was never any doubt that the Christmas decorating was my bailiwick. Well, over the years...our collection of Christmas decorations has grown a little. Oh okay, so it's grown a lot. Like I said in a previous post, we have 43 boxes of stuff now. However, you have to understand that 2 of those boxes are outdoor stuff and about another 5 or 6 are the Christmas trees themselves. So see? That means we only have about 35 or 36 boxes of stuff. (Okay so that doesn't sound as reasonable when I see it in print as it did when I thought it in my head). But anyway, we now have so much stuff that it absolutely overwhelms me when I go to put it all up. A few years ago, I even went through it all and gave a good bit to Nick and Jodie (my son and his wife) but I just can't seem to help myself...I'm always getting more and more and more. I love seeing all the stuff up. I do. It warms my heart like you wouldn't believe. But it's just too much to do by myself. And there's no little kids, like Maddy, around to love it with me. Kaleb and Jacob like it, sure. But they don't like it enough to not see it as a chore when they're asked to help with it. So...where was I headed with this story...oh yeah...in the middle of the knock down drag out that Randey and I were engaging in over what I thought was his severe lack of planning, I realized that we have one of these fights every year over something. You can almost set your calendar by it. Then I started questioning why we have this annual screamfest. And the answer is stress, I think. I'm so stressed out by my house being basically trashed for the week it takes me to put everything up that I'm almost certifiable. I mean geez, you know, it's more than just putting the Christmas stuff up. First you have to pack away your every day stuff...the knick-knacks, pillows, throws, etc., etc., etc. Then you have to clean everything in sight (and even some stuff that's out of sight!) and then you have to put up all the garland...garland over the windows, the shelves, the archways, the doors....garland everywhere (I love that. A room all decked out with twinkling evergreen garland. Ahhhhh. And this is why I have such a problem...I can't even explain why I'm not decorating every inch of my house this year without going on and on about how much I love seeing it done! I. Must. Seek. Therapy!) Then you have to rearrange your furniture to put the tree in a good spot and then you have to make sure you have all the electrical things evenly spaced out so you're not overloading any one circuit and then before you know it, you're overwhelmed!! Or at least, I am. So I stopped in the middle of decorating this year. I had gotten the garland up in the living room and the pre-lit tree put up (with the boys' help - see? they will help, just not for hours on end! lol), I got the ribbon garland wound around that tree, the village set up on the bookshelves and I got a few knick-knacks unpacked. But that's as far as I got before The Big Blowout. Afterwards, I decided that fighting every single year was a horrible way to "celebrate" the holidays. I'm crushed to think that my kids have had to hear this probably just about every Christmas season of their lives and that's what they remember! Not the glitter, the wonder, the joy...but their crazy, stressed out mother screaming like a fishwife at their father over something that really should have been "discussed", not fought over. So I stopped unpacking the Christmas stuff and sent everything back up to the attic. I've got my house back in order and I'm working really hard on thinking about the meaning of the season and not the "winter wonderland" I always want to create in our home. It's not the decorations that matter, it's the feelings we have for one another. Having said that, I have to admit that I miss the "stuff", though. I look at my snowman advent and I miss seeing all the other snowmen we've collected over the years. I see the big snowglobe Susan got me one year and I miss seeing all the other ones, too. I see my "Yule Burner Talking Log" my sister gave me for my birthday back in 1999 (?) and I miss the animated Dalmation named Dipstick that I bought in '97. I see my walls, laid bare in spots, and I miss the Christmas wall decorations that I put up year in and year out. But these are things I miss. I think I've been very selfish every year at Christmas and have decorated mainly for myself. As much as I miss seeing it all this year, I just can't bring myself to ask Randey and the boys to help me put it up. I'm sure they would do it, but I don't think they'd do it out of joy. They'd do it as a chore, I think. And that's not what the season is supposed to be about. They have chores enough without making Christmas one, too. So I'm learning to adjust to what is probably "normal" to everyone else. lol And if I could just look at our Christmas tree with it's "minimalistic" ornamentation without thinking "geez, that's the MOST unattractive tree we've ever, ever had", I'm sure this would go a lot easier for me! (I usually have so many ornaments on the tree that you can barely tell it is a tree underneath them all!)


So what's the lesson to be learned here? I'll tell you...don't just love the pageantry of the season yourself...teach your children to love the wonder of creating it with you! (Or maybe the lessen is even more basic than that...maybe you should just have fewer decorations than a crazy woman such as myself feels the need to collect. lol) Seriously though, I've managed to teach my children over the years that I love the atmosphere of sparkle and wonder. But I failed to teach them to. I wish I'd asked them to help way back when they would have thought it was fun and I particularly wish I had kept in mind that "perfect" is best left to God. Maybe then our decorating would have been a fun, family event instead of a time of stress and fighting. Live and learn, eh? (But I have really got to work more on that whole "learn your lesson while the lesson still counts" concept, you know it?) And I have really, really got to learn to love that fugly tree....