What’s Christmas Without a Headless Angel

Other folks would be aghast at the idea of topping their tree with a headless angel, but we’re the Henrys and if there isn’t something broken or rusted or falling down or falling off then we have disgraced the name of hardworking assholes the world-over.

We don’t just keep busted inanimate objects, we display them with pride wrapped in nationalism! Pointing out, like Dad, that the Headless Angel must be old because it was made in the USA. Which means, of course, the angels and stars by way of China are utter bullshit; only American manufacturing can get you forty years and a decapitated head.

I called Dad the other day to ask about the Headless Angel. How was she feeling? Was her head still rolling? Can I put her on my tree?

“You’re killing me,” he said.

Insinuating that he was somehow worse off than the angel.

“You mean I have to go look for it?”

Of course. Even if he was suddenly blinded by tinsel, I’m sure he could not only draw us a map, but tell us in a painstakingly detailed 45-minute conversation the quickest way to get up the steps, turn, and oh, whattaya know, there it is.

Obviously he found it, then told me there should be no glue, no Scotch, no surgery at my humble abode. If there was, he would hang me atop his tree: headless.

Only in my family does Christmas come with bodily harm over a 40 year-old, American made, probably bought when Sears still had the Roebuck, tree-topper.

And yet there she is. Still shining, still awkwardly Aryan in her lily whiteness. Her face gone, rubbed away by years of locomotion against tissue paper and dated ornaments. A testament to my family’s tradition of old is better, new is bullshit, and crap is best.