Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

Chrimble?
Admin CavemanJoe – 2013-12-25 02:47:47 [Permalink]

So I'm sitting in the dog's chair at the family house, going "Well, I should do a Christmas post, shouldn't I?"

Emily and I bought our first house, this time last year. We spent Christmas Eve moving house, so it didn't feel too Christmassy - but this year was different. Some very good friends of ours donated their old artificial tree, and a very fine tree it is too.

I think that when any couple obtains their first house, and their first Christmas tree, one or both of them will get some sort of mad idea above their station that the tree will, somehow, look good. Stylish. Colour-coordinated. Not like it usually is.

Not like it's always been.

You grow up in a house full of siblings and children of siblings, you get used to letting the little ones decorate, and maybe giving their efforts a quick go-over after the fact - y'know, move a few things up higher so the top of the tree isn't completely bare, take the breakable ornaments off the weakest branches, that sort of thing.

And you get used to the ornaments that you've always put up. The cardboard robin, with your name on it and a tick from your teacher (who retired two decades ago) that your mum won't throw away. The plastic apples that have been missing their leaves since 1984. The odd shiny orange one that once had a model nativity scene inside - in the absence of the baby Jesus and his flock of admirers, who you may have eaten when you were a toddler, the bauble now resembles the Eye of Sauron. The "angel" that is a doll festooned with toilet paper in the shape of a dress, whose nightmarish mechanical eyes spring open and vibrate as you're placing this abomination gingerly into the tree. Nobody knows where the doll came from, but it goes on the tree anyway, and watches you for a couple of weeks. Staring. Smiling.

But ah, this is your tree. You're going to go out and buy baubles in two colours only, lamps in a nice warm white, silver tinsel, no scary doll - it'll look fantastic.

But... you have some ornaments, don't you? From your family and loved ones. You open the box, and here's the cardboard snowman your nephew made when he was three, and look, the Santa-on-the-toilet ornament that Feisty Uncle Whatsisname saw in a gift shop on his travels, you can't not put that up, it's traditional.

Also, there's some tinsel in here - have you seen the price of tinsel? We'll just use this stuff this year, get some new tinsel next year...

So you decorate the tree, and you look at what you've done, this glistening flashing rainbow thing with three cats climbing it or cowering from it, and all at once you realise that the reason you only see colour-coordinated Christmas trees in catalogues and shop displays is because they only exist in catalogues and shop displays, and everywhere else is too contaminated by the clashing love and kinship of humanity, and you go "Well. That's... that's jolly."

Yup. It's jolly. Like strapping your fists to your back, or stuffing a bed into your backpack, or rolling a zero-sided die, or all those other bugs we're never gonna fix.

I expect the toilet paper angel to show up any day now.

Merry Christmas!

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