The holiday season is officially complete at Mullings Central. I consider it another triumph over elementary physics and chemistry that, once again, our house did not burn down.
I spent a month looking warily at cheap, electrical rigging wrapped around a tinder-dry pine tree. We had an even greater menace outside, where live electrical devices were wrapped around dead greenery, draping the front door against which rain would occasionally beat.
In addition to the very real physical hazard to hearth and home, the annual "Taking Down the House Decs" ceremony has the additional effect of creating a disturbance in the emotional force.
The Christmas tree comes INTO the house each year by virtue of two fat guys, wheezing and puffing their way up the stairs. The tree, at this point is what is known as "fresh." This is like saying Enron's financial statements are "complete."
I am not certain the Federal Trade Commission has ruled on this, but it seems that in usage, a "fresh tree" is one on which the needles more-or-less stay attached to the branches.
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 who delivered the tree put it.
This requires me to:
- Fill a pot (why don't you use a pitcher?) with the aforementioned hot water;
- Carry it from the kitchen to the living room (under the watchful, if not worshipful, eye of the MDofS&P);
- Spill only molecular amounts; a mist, 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 still-attached (and aptly-named) needles, and;
- Fill the container.
In our house this procedure is affectionately known as the annual "Renewal of our Marriage Vows" ceremony.
So, now comes the Taking Down ceremony. The angels, the candles, and the other tchachkas are simple. But the tree 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 actually used to decorate the 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 five words:
"Never mind. I'll do it."
Dragging the tree out of the house is another annual fun-filled family affair. About Christmas day when the tree was no longer "fresh," the needles had the tendency fall off any time you got within three feet, thus creating any zephyr of air flow around it.
By now, the needles actually jump off the tree and bury themselves in the carpet, in the furniture and, as you carry it through the entire length of the house to the back porch for its heroic swan dive to the driveway below, into any cell of uncovered skin.
Next year I'm getting one of those suits the Senate staff is wearing to work in the Hart Building.
The branches always stick out a little farther than you thought, so there is the annual "Why didn't you let me help you?" discussion as if two of us struggling with the tree would have made the branches fold back nicely against the trunk thus avoiding the annual "Knocking Over the Topiary on the Kitchen Counter" ceremony.
In the end, the decorations are back in their boxes, the boxes are back in the closet, the tree was removed by the people who remove trees, and I'll have these lights untangled by � Election Day. Easy.
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