16 Days Till Xmas

I took part in decorating my first real Xmas tree in about 10 years last night.

My disdain for Xmas began a long time ago, in the very home that I was raised to love Xmas. When I was about 16, my mother and I collectively said fuck it to the decorating of Xmas trees. 'It's too messy' she would say, 'And what about the cats?' I would throw in. My father fumed, stomped around, made that weird awful scrunched up angry face that he does and declared that he would not let us Jews ruin his Xmas, and that he would get his own damn tree, drag the huge box of ornaments out from the depths of the storage room and decorate it himself. Yeah, it never happened.

And I was perfectly happy to not decorate the tree. I did not miss it at all, and on Xmas morning, gifts still appeared. My mom has since bought this funny little flat tree that you hang up on the wall. You can put a handful of ornaments on it, and it lights up and everything. She may or may not still put it up.

So last night was tree decorating time at Adam's family's house. These people like Xmas so I kept my opinions to myself last night, and needless to say, pretty much enjoyed myself. We even went and picked out a tree together. Now I understand that this is normal tradition for family's to do, but that was never anything that we did when I was little. Heres how it went down every year: The door would fly open (usually pretty late at night), there would be some cursing and yelling, the telltale sound of a tree being dragged across the living room floor, followed by the hum of a vacuum cleaning up the pine needly mess. And I don't think I'd be lying if I said that the tree would potentially go for days without being attended to with ornaments.

Now what I did enjoy about decorating the tree about a day or two later was that we would BLAST THE SHIT out of the Mariah Carey Xmas album. Now that is a quality album, and if you are detecting any sarcasm here, you are sorely mistaken my friend, because that lady has pipes for days and has done nothing but improve upon Xmas music, in my opinion.

So out we were last night, in the frigid night air of December, bundled up and wandering around a maze of Xmas trees. We all darted out, hoping to the be first to find the most perfect specimen, not too tall (which was tough because all of the trees at this particular place were enormous mutants!), just perfectly bushy without too many weird extra limbs sticking out the top. And guess who found it bitches! ME!!! Got my picture taken with it and everything. We went home, I had a lot to drink, and the for most part, watched them decorate the tree. I helped a little, but I'm not going to pretend like I liked it!

; )