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Removing the Christmas Tree
Rich Galen Monday January 3, 2005
Notes:
1. This is a minor re-write of a column first published in January, 2002. The events described haven't changed much.
2. Mullings is off to India this (Monday) evening to help Dr. K.A. Paul and the Global Peace Initiative deliver some 20 TONS of relief supplies in Madras. A special Mullings will more fully describe this effort.
The holiday season is now officially complete at Mullings Central. I consider it another triumph over elementary physics and chemistry that, once again, our house did not burn down, and divorce proceedings were not begun.
I spent the past month looking warily at cheap, electrical rigging wrapped around a dead, tinder-dry pine tree. There is an even greater menace outside, where live electrical devices were wrapped around dead, tinder-dry greenery, draping the front door against which rain would occasionally beat.
The Christmas tree is brought INTO the house each year by two fat guys, wheezing and puffing their way up the stairs. The tree is delivered in a condition which is known as "fresh." This is like saying the Enron and WorldCom annual financial statements were "complete."
In usage, a "fresh tree" is one on which the needles more-or-less stay attached to the branches unless something actually brushes up against them. This condition lasts for about 20 minutes after the tree comes to your house.
My first job of the holiday season is to put hot water into the container under the tree to "improve the uptake," as the two graduate agronomists with the sagging jeans who delivered the tree put it.
This requires me to:
Fill a pot ("Why don't you use a pitcher?") with the hot water;
Carry it from the kitchen to the living room (under the watchful, if not worshipful, eye of the Mullings Director of Standards & Practices);
Spill maybe molecular amounts; wisps, really (not, as SOME people have claimed, enough to cause the hardwood floors to warp);
Crawl under the tree getting stabbed in the arms, the neck, and the forehead by the barely-attached (and aptly-named) needles, and;
Fill the container.
In our house this procedure is affectionately known as the "Renewal of our Marriage Vows" ceremony.
Now comes the "Taking Down the Tree" ceremony. The angels, the candles, and the other tchachkas are simple. But the tree itself is a potential deal breaker. And the lights.
Christmas lights costs about ten cents for a million feet. Given the loving care with which the Christmas lights in our house are treated, you might think they were the ones used to light the actual manger in Bethlehem.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm rolling up the lights."
"You are not rolling them up. You're bunching them up. They'll get tangled."
"What difference does it make? We'll buy new ones next year."
"That's a waste of money."
"We'll buy them now when they're half off."
"They'll get lost by next year."
"Why won't THESE get lost by next year?"
This conversation always ends with the same six words: "Never mind. I'll do it myself."
After the lighting situation is solved, dragging the tree out of the house is another annual fun-filled family affair.
About Christmas day when the tree was well beyond "fresh," the needles had the tendency fall off any time you got within three feet, creating any zephyr of air flow around it.
During the New Year's Day football games a sideways glace caused a blizzard of tiny green spikes to fly through the air.
By this weekend, the needles actually jumped off the tree and buried themselves in the carpet, in the furniture and, as one carried it through the entire length of the house to the back porch for its heroic swan dive to the driveway below, into every cell of uncovered skin.
The branches always stick out a little farther than you thought and so they tend to scratch the paint in the doorways which leads to the annual "Why didn't you let me help you?" ritual, as if two of us struggling with the thing would have made the branches fold back nicely against the trunk, thus avoiding the annual "Knocking Over the Topiary on the Kitchen Counter" ceremony.
Today, the decorations are back in their boxes, the boxes are back in the closet, the tree will removed by the people who remove trees, and I'll have those lights untangled by � Thanksgiving. Easy.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A Mullfoto of the culprit and a Catchy Caption of the Day.
--END --
Copyright © 2005 Richard A. Galen
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