Tag: Decorations

  • Decorations

    As it is Christmas time, again, we are in the process of decorating the apartment for the season. Unfortunately, when I say “we” that doesn’t include me. Not that I am excluded, as the wife and kid give me plenty of opportunities to decorate. But since the kid’s birth, I have found my drive to put up a tree, and lights, wreaths and garland, declining year after year.

    Now, to clarify, I am excited about Christmas time. I love shopping, and the baking of cookies and cakes, seeing friends, going out to look at the lights in the City, and all the holiday events that are around here. I enjoy taking part in the kid’s excitement for the season, and we have a great number of traditions we take part in leading up to the big day. I like Christmas!

    I just don’t have a desire to decorate for it.

    It feels like a bit of a chore.

    In a weird way, because all my life’s a circle, I think I am coming around to a better understanding of why my father behaved the way he did during the holidays. He wasn’t a grinch or grumpy at all. No, he just got all the boxes down from the attic the weekend after Thanksgiving, and sat on the couch watching sports, sometimes drinking a beer. If he was asked to help out – put something up high as my mother was rather short, or give an opinion if a decoration was level – he would, of course, do it, but he would return back to the couch. When my mother announced that everything was hung, my dad would get up and put the empty boxes back up in the attic, without complaint.

    And my father is a big kid during Christmas. He likes getting up early to see everyone’s reaction to the “surprise” present that appeared under the tree. He always played with me and my brothers Christmas morning, and same went with the grandkids. He was, and is, a joy to be around.

    Just don’t ask him to put decorations up.

    I guess same goes for me.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Christmas Has to Go, Can You Believe It, Must Win, and Serious

    (It’s a trip… it’s got a FUNKY beat. And I can bug out to it!)

    This is the weekend that we are taking the Christmas decorations down. Normally, we do this on January 1st, as a sort of cleaning the house for the New Year. And I think you can read between the lines there and see that the wife and I have passed the days of staying up late and waking with a hangover. But this year, we didn’t get around to it. We put it off. Not that we had a good reason to do that, other than we wanted to lay around and not doing anything on New Year’s Day. The end result was that we got an extra week of Christmas, which has left me feeling like the holiday has over stayed its welcome. I like Christmas, but I really like it when it lives tightly between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

     Sometimes I find it hard to believe that we live in a world where the movies Cocktail and Road House exist.

    And I need the Cowboys and Tottenham to win this weekend. Simple as that. If it doesn’t happen I will be heartbroken and disconnected from the universe.

    Some evenings, late at night, when I am alone on the couch while my family sleeps, I start to believe that the core of me is a very serious person. Alone and in the dark, I am confident in this pronouncement. And I say these things to myself when I am normally watching a terrible ninja movie, or something awful by Bert I. Gordon. That is when I know that I am a contradiction at all times. A silly one at that. I like walking funny and talking in goofy voices. I make up songs about doing mundane tasks. And I’d rather laugh than cry. I’d rather make you laugh; Try to make you happy through humor. I still attempt to rob an honest melancholy tear from people… but… I have never felt sure that’s what I’m best at. Yet, honestly, I have never felt sure about anything. And if I think too hard about that, I might start to wonder, worry, and then cry. Which is why I’d rather laugh. Hold it off, at bay, for a little while longer.

  • GOURDS!

    I bought gourds this morning at Trader Joe’s. You know, the Fall/Autumn/Halloween gourds that come out on October 1st, and are sold through Thanksgiving. Well, it was two tiny pumpkins and a gourd to be exact, but as I get deeper into the season, I will buy more of these. I wouldn’t call it a weakness, but it is the one seasonal decoration that I indulge.

    Soon, most likely this weekend, we’ll go to our storage space and get the box of Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations to put up. Most of what is in there are silly, kid-like things to put up. Also in that box, there is a collection of dollar store small glittery pumpkins. Soon our kitchen table will be a collection of both real and fake gourds. You know, how the Pilgrims intended.

    When the kid was little, two or three, she would paint the white pumpkins to add to the decorations. I don’t think she does that anymore. And I start to wonder how long we’ll keep decorating the apartment with these cartoonish and child-like decorations?

    My parents kept reusing all the old holiday decorations until I went away to college. With me, the final child was out of the house, so my mom decided that it was time to have more grown up decorations for all the holidays. Gone were the doe-eyed cats and bats, to be replaced with wreaths of fake orange leaves and gourds. (But her gourds were plastic and ceramic.) Christmas even got more mature with an all-white lights on an all-white tree. You get the idea…

    I have a feeling we’ll do the same thing when our kid heads out of here, to college or where ever.

    But I like my gourds.