December 18, 2010

My mom decorates her entire house for Christmas each year, or more accurately - my mom makes my sister and I decorate her entire house each year.  This is an all-day event of carrying boxes of Christmas shit down from the attic, unpacking said Christmas shit, and then packing up non-Christmas shit to make room for the Christmas shit. 

When my dad got sick my parents bought a fake tree.  It looks pretty nice but I miss having a real tree (though not enough to buy my own tree because quite frankly all my Christmas decorating mojo is spent on my mom - my fanatical Christmas decorating neighborhood is lucky if I find the energy to put up a wreath; so far they have not yet been so lucky).

My sister put up the tree the past couple of years, but this year it was my job.  The tree has lights permanently affixed to it.  There were no less than 3 strands of lights that were not working.  Apparently they haven't been working for 2 years and apparently rather than fix them, my mom and sister just hung additional lights up on those branches. Well obviously my anal nature found that to be an unsatisfactory solution, so I took it upon myself to search for the missing/loose/broken bulbs which would have been relatively easy if the strands were not permanently attached to the tree, but they were and so following the wires around to find every single bulb on each strand hidden amongst the branches took for-fucking-EVER.  (Though my sister's dog did help me by sniffing my head and licking my face when I was lying on my back under the tree and then leaning all up against me when I was sitting next to the tree (he's like 70 lbs).)

Various Christmas cheer type things that I thought/muttered/yelled as I was attempting this chore:

• "This shouldn't be this hard.  I'm a goddamned engineer for christ's sake!"
• "Fucking DAMMIT" (I may have said this several dozen times...)
• "OOoooo! Found one.  Praise baby jesus!"
• "Yes! And then there was light!"

Followed by:

• "Oh.  Holy hell.  Fuck me!" after the lights quickly went out again.

But I did finally succeed - TWO HOURS LATER.  My arms were all scratched to hell (I was wearing a t-shirt because my mom keeps her house inferno-hot) but any completed job is much more satisfying if you're bleeding at the end (and I was, which was even more awesome).   

I actually told my sister and my mom that this was my biggest accomplishment of the year.  

And it was.

No contest.

Merry fucking Christmas dammit!