My Christmas Blog

I have always maintained that I was introduced to foul language by my mother. I am now convinced that I learned this linguistic ability from my dad. At Christmas. Putting lights on the tree. You see, it’s my belief that foul language reached its peak when people decided to start putting colored lights on trees.

Nothing says Christmas to me like waking up early, walking out into the family room and seeing the tree all lit up with multi-colored lights. A previous decision-maker in my life preferred white lights and wanted to buy a tree pre-wired with white lights. But this is such a strong association for me that when I had the opportunity to buy a pre-lit tree I had to pass it by because I couldn’t give up the multi-colored warm-fuzzy of Christmas. I couldn’t imagine the rest of my Christmases without colored lights on my tree. What fool prefers to string lights up every year compared to the holiday bliss of a pre-lit tree? This one. Colored lights are my own little Christmas-fuzzy, if you will.

I’m not going to pretend that I have an idyllic Christmas tree, lights and all. Not by a long shot. First of all, it’s ugly. I mean it doesn’t look anything like (A) a tree, or (B) the tree on the box. But it’s easy to set up and I can usually have it done in a couple of hours, soup to nuts. This year, it took a few more hours. As I assemble my tree I add the lights, layer by layer like any rational human being. This year the colored lights – part of my Christmas tradition for more than a decade – failed me. There I stood on a Saturday morning with my tree half assembled and half strung up with lights. And I stood with one and a half strings of colored lights that wouldn’t light up. My particular brand of holiday language was on fine display.

Off to the hardware store I went. Four new strings of colored lights. $38 with my Ace Rewards card. One of them – the first one I opened – didn’t work right out of the box. Three new strings of colored lights. $38 with my Ace Rewards card.

Three new strings of colored lights are not enough for my tree but they will be this year. It just wasn’t worth the hassle to go back to the hardware store. Unstringing the old lights and restringing the new lights unleashed a string of multi-colored curse words like none you’ve ever heard. Well, at least none you’ve ever heard with ‘Frosty the Snowman’ playing in the background. And at the end of the day, after all my Christmas profanity I have an ugly tree to show for it. My tree is bare, misshapen, and as I mentioned, looks nothing like an actual tree.

I woke up Sunday morning, the family room was dark except for my ugly tree lit up by three new strings of multicolored lights. Christmas-fuzzy satisfied, I went out and got the paper then made a cup of coffee. I love the holidays. What’s the opposite of foul language? Whatever it is, that’s how I felt Sunday morning.