X: 12/10/02

Work Diary, 12/10/02

Last night I dug out our Christmas tree. It's kept in a basement
cupboard, underneath the Halloween decorations and bag after bag of
fake poinsettias. The tree is one of those 1960s tinsel things; it's so
light that I can pick it up with two fingers. We bought it about eight
years ago, from two drunks holding a yard sale outside their apartment
building. Cost: $1.00, plus a roach infestation that spread to our
entire building and which had the neighbors glaring at us for
months.

Somehow, the holiday spirit has yet to take me over. It may be because
we currently have a mattress, box springs, and half a vanity in our
living room while the guest bedroom gets painted. The dining room table
is covered with junk mail, flyers, bills, and old Vanity Fair magazines
I can't bring myself to read. Plus, while in an impulsive brown mood,
my partner purchased a rug for the living room that's the color of
burnt fudge. The recessed lighting helps but the room resembles a
clearing in the woods where bad things happen. The mushroom-colored
couch doesn't help.

Along with the tree, I brought up several boxes of old Christmas
ornaments. Some are very old, like the pale pink glass balls from the
fifties. Others are too fragile to use, like the cookie cutter stars
and deer that a friend made. None of them match whatsoever.

Ignoring the ornaments, I set my sights on the lights. Years of
twisting and winding the damn things have turned them into ratty bird's
nests. I spent fifteen minutes unraveling one set, only to plug it in
and discover it didn't work. After two more sets, I found a strand of
blue that lit up halfway. I popped the tinsel star on top of the tree,
wound the working lights around the tree's base, and wadded up the
non-working bits so I could stuff them behind a curtain. You can't
really see anything amiss unless you lean over a chair, balance
yourself on the windowsill, and look down at a ninety-degree angle.
Most of my guests are usually too drunk to attempt such a feat, so I'm
not worried.

I put off actually trimming the tree as long as I could, hanging our
stockings and picking through the Christmas detritus to place on the
mantel. Then I dug out the fake poinsettias, which have been crammed
into plastic sacks so long that they look like the real thing:
wrinkled, frayed, dying. Those went into various vases around the
living and dining rooms, bright swatches of red that look like a giant
blew his brains out while sitting on the coffee table.

Alas, the tree trimming had to happen. I had a design problem, and it
was all IKEA's fault. While in Houston, we went to IKEA and bought some
light brown glass balls. Well, maybe they're not light brown; maybe
they're off-red, or burnt amber. And that's the point: They don't
appear to be any color. Personally, I believe the folks at IKEA had
some left over paint, which they mixed together to develop what amounts
to essence of baby shit. Then they threw it on some glass balls to
frustrate people throughout the world.

I also had some giant round plastic ornaments, very simple, in silver,
green, and blue. Along with the IKEA poop balls, I thought, I could
keep the tree "natural." I begin throwing it all on, over the blue
lights, and finished it off with four plastic strands of ivy. Like the
poinsettias, the ivy has seen better days. Anyone looking at it would
automatically think, "Bargain bin."

Martha Stewart I ain't. Our Christmas tree looks like a child's
drawing, the kind that a teacher puts on the lower left corner of the
chalkboard because she knows she must. Eight years ago, when my aunt
first saw the tinsel tree, she said, "That is so ugly." If she saw it
today, she'd say, "Lord! That is the UGLIEST thing I've ever seen."
It's good to know tradition remains alive and well in my family.

I don't know; maybe if I stare at the tree long enough, it'll grow on
me. It certainly looks as if something's growing on it.