Holly Daze

My parents weren’t ones for holiday decor. They’re much more the teak and polished silver crowd. Which means that my garish taste rarely goes unnoticed – or unmocked – by them. I’ve gotten used to it over the years and, in fact, I take great pride in being the most tacky member of my family.

Yesterday found me alone for the first time ever on Thanksgiving, and so I was all, “Hai, let’s get these CHRISTMAS decorations up.”

Let’s keep in mind, that my Christmas tree from LAST year was still sitting out.

See, I am not only tacky, but highly lazy.

So I was sitting alone, eating my pathetic take-out pizza on Thanksgiving, when I realized it was high time for me to get my Christmas on (crying into solitary pizza is just depressing). I went down to the basement, dragged out all of the boxes of Christmas stuffs, and proceeded to figure out what I could use to deck my halls and what was to be put away for a year with less destructive children. I’m assuming about half of the Christmas stuff I own will be usable in approximately 2050.

The problem is that whenever I decide to do something that I don’t know how to do (read: most everything), I’m really just fakin’ it. So when I pulled out the string of light-up garland, I sorta stared at it awhile, just expecting it to put itself in place, lights and all.

Turns out, not so much.

I sighed, dragging it up the stairs, once I realized that I would have to actually figure out how to deck my fucking halls. Alone.

Carefully, I strung the stuff up over the (non-working) fireplace, twining it this way and that, happily imagining how happy my kids would be when they saw it. Huffing and puffing, sweating and panting, I stood back to admire my handiwork.

It was pretty spectacular.

That is, until I tried to plug the thing in. Dead. D-E-A-D. I grabbed an extension cord and tried to see if it was simply the outlet. Still nothing.

Unhappily I realized that all of the garland with lights were dead.

Since my parents would rather shoot themselves in their pretentious face than use pedestrian light fixtures, I had no idea how to determine which of the lightbulbs were dead. I spent a couple of minutes looking at the lights, trying to figure out how one was supposed to DO that.

Never did figure it out.

Instead, I strung another string of lights INTO the garland. It was glorious. And a ridiculous amount of EXTRA work.

I’m not sure, exactly, who the joke was on.

I hope it wasn’t me.