I’m sitting under the mistletoe and pondering; how many divorces are caused by the process of Christmas decorating? My guess would be one in three, and I may be super close to becoming a Christmas statistic.
As with everything in my marriage, every year is the same, and every year I say I’m not doing it by myself. And every year I forget that promise and do it anyway and every year Nancy sits inside the warm, cozy house, under his favorite blanky and watches football as I over-decorate. And every year I throw something at him. This year, the it was an extra-large ball of twine. It didn’t hurt. Enough.
I bought the tree myself, as usual, and begged some nice young man to shove it into the back of my car. He was cute, too. But I probably was old enough to be his older sister. At any rate, to extricate it from my car and bring it into the house and set it into the center of the round, green globe is Nancy’s sole task. He won’t even straighten that sucker as it points westward and droops forlornly, perhaps feeling my pain and disillusion.
He then hops over to his recliner, cracks open a Snapple, opens a bag of chips, turns up the football game because 81 on the volume scale isn’t loud enough and he’s like a cooked turkey: DONE. Every year it infuriates me. Sometimes, he may plop the angel on top, as well. As if that will save him from hell.
Already irritated, I was swagging lights around the porch, when the whole damned strand shorted out. Not one bulb remained active. On the top rung of the rickety, old ladder that was built in the early 1930’s, I slumped. I felt defeated. I’d been stringing and nailing and lighting for three hours at that point. I yelled to Nancy to run to the store and grab me more lights. He remained inert and actually offered this wise query to me:” Why even use lights? No one sees them during the day anyway.” Even Mary had three wise men. That’s three more than I have. I slammed out, the way any 7-year-old would, drove to the store and grabbed the freaking lights. Christmas spirit? Maybe a 2.
As I was re-stringing everything, this man who apparently has never seen an episode of Dateline where a disgruntled wife spikes her husband’s Gatorade with D-Con, literally tapped on the window from his indoor roost … WITH A TOOTSIE POP, and yelled: “SO crooked! SOOO crooked!” I then threw a pair of wire cutters at his reflection in the window and broke the window. Merry Christmas, I hate you.
And here we are. Every year. Nothing changes, and nothing will ever change. I will keep decorating, because it matters to me, and he will keep tapping the window with his Tootsie Pop because it doesn’t matter to him. We all have our roles. Mine is beleaguered and annoyed wife and his is happy-as-a-donkey -in-a-manger husband. One of us ends up with a bottle of Tums and one of us is eating another Tootsie Pop. And I will let you guess which one sleeps alone the Night Before Christmas. The unwise man. He will have a Blue, Blue, Blue, Blue Christmas.
