When it comes to ending the holiday season, I implement the same approach I use with break-ups: rip that Band-Aid off. No sense in keeping reminders of the reasons for the season around the house if it’s going to be another 364 days before that fat man in a red suit comes calling again. It’s over. Time to move on to the next day of celebration like, you know, New Years or National Clean Off Your Desk Day. (January 10, if you want to add it to your calendar.) So, once the date flipped to December 26, I decided I had delayed long enough. Time to pack away all things draped with tinsel, striped with peppermint, or hitched to a reindeer.
It’s easy to romanticize holiday preparations: watching the Yule log burn in the fireplace, searching for the perfect greeting card to capture your sentiments about the season, decorating the Christmas tree. No one waxes poetic about the other annual tradition: taking all of this crap down. But just as the stocking were hung by the chimney with care, so must those same stockings be wadded up, jammed in the corner of a repurposed cardboard box, and wedged onto a shelving unit in a basement... with care.
I know pencil trees are all the rage, with their emaciated limbs and their exposed stumps. But, when it comes to holiday shrubbery, I’m a chubby chaser. I like my trees fat. Plump branches popping out everywhere, barely able to squish into the corner of a room. Pottery Barn can keep its rail-thin trees with boyish hips. My dream Christmas tree would have a muffin top.
Confession: I do … have … an artificial tree. I’m a faker. Nothing against you real-tree-ifites. I’m sure the idea of driving two hours to a field, slugging through frozen mud, saw in hand, to pick out your favorite tree holds a certain amount of charm for you. But before you wag your sap-sticky finger at me, let me point out that what you are doing when you walk through that man-made forest of firs is basically playing judge, jury, and executioner. Think about it: if you were a glorious evergreen, reaching your piney needles towards the sun, working to stand taller and taller each year, what is the last thing you would want? I would bet being chopped down, bound and strapped to the top of a Volkswagon would be high on your list. Better wash off that sap, it’s basically tree blood on your hands.
Then what do you do? You drag this tree into a dark hot room, screw to a stand, and barely give it enough to drink. I mean, depending on your level of dedication to Real Tree Protocol you’re pretty much starving or waterboarding that thing through the holidays. Then what do you do, once the limbs have drooped and the needles have piled up on your hardwood floor (another example of plant murder, by the way)? Do you drag it down your driveway and dump its woody corpse by the curb? From the views out my car window on the drive to work on January 2nd, hell yes you do. And I, a shunned tree faker have to see all of these violations of the Geneva Conventions for days on end. If I actually catch someone doing the dragging deed down the driveway, fighting the branches trying to grab the cement and fight back, I always have the urge to roll down my window and shout, “BRING OUT YER DEAD! BRING OUT YER DEAD!”
Disposing of an artificial tree doesn’t boast much more dignity, though. Growing up, we used to take out each individual branch, smooth down its pipe-cleaner branches, and stuff each one in a cardboard box that had long ago lost its structural integrity and required bandages of duct tape to, you know, be a box. So we basically dismembered it every year. (Side note: I learned another tidbit of Procreator knowledge this weekend while visiting my college roommate and her three little girls. You know, the little angels of bathtub poop fame from a blog post earlier this year? Noncreators out there, listen up. Whenever a child mentions that he/she used to have a pet butterfly but doesn’t have it anymore, never ask what happened to it. The answer will almost never be that it flew away. Instead, it will be that a sibling killed it by pulling off its wings. You’re welcome.)
That was back in the days before trees came pre-lit and in three, easy-to-assemble sections. What used to take over an hour now takes about five minutes and some moderate hefting. Last year my parents even gave me an upgrade on the old box storage method with a tree bag. It’s basically a big red duffel bag with a handle on one end and two wheels on the other. (Sadly, in my college days, I could have easily filled it up with primping items and clothing options for a three-day trip. I had yet to learn what it means to “travel light.”) So all I have to do is give each tree section a bear hug to squash the branches, shove it in the duffel bag, and zip it up.
Once again, my love of all things fat when it comes to trees made this a little more difficult than it should have been. Despite the fact that the duffle was so large it could moonlight as an above-ground pool cover, I could barely get the thing zipped up. After wrenching the zipper pull the last few inches, I exhaled in relief and walked over to the basement door to prepare for the final descent. That’s when I looked back and saw this:
Looks kind of like a body bag, doesn’t it?
There is nothing less Christmas-feeling than thumping a body bag down the stairs to the basement and shoving it into a closet. I felt like I had literally stuffed Santa into a duffel bag and dragged him into a storage unit. I couldn’t get the bag all the way into the closet, despite multiple kicks and shoves. Eventually I gave up, leaving the corpse of Christmas past sticking halfway out and propping the closet door open. So now, every time I go down to throw in a load of laundry, I get to see this depressing site:
Sorry, Santa. Like a phoenix from the ashes, you will rise again next year.
Another challenge to de-Christmasfication that no one talks about is what to do with all of the greeting cards that cheered up one’s mailbox and mantle for the past few weeks. Growing up I loved getting letters in the mail, especially when I would move to a new state and wrote letters to keep in touch with old friends. Now the only people I lick a stamp for are the County Treasurer (for my taxes) and my grandma. But I still send out holiday cards every December and love the fact that some of my friends and family do the same.
Here’s the dilemma, though: what to do with them after the holidays have come and gone? I used to let them linger under magnets on my fridge until mid-March when I finally had to move them to make way for shower invitations and baby announcements. But I got a sleek new fridge for Christmas which is too cool for magnets, meaning that I can’t use them on its stainless steel finish. Normally, after I’m done reading regular pieces of mail I just throw them away. So I gathered up the greeting cards and went over to the trash can...
Okay, throwing these away used to be way easier when most of the cards just boasted blinged-out cardinals perched in snowy trees, or that old broad Maxine smoking a ciggy and crabbing about mall parking lots. But now everyone sends cards with pictures of their families posed around fireplaces or donning reindeer antlers. I love getting them because I get to see their familiar faces beaming out Christmas cheer. However, tossing my cousin, his wife, and their two perfect kids into the trash can beside egg shells and snotty Kleenex seems a little callous. I decided to pull those and only throw away the non-photo cards.
The rest of the cards have either the Angel Gabriel, the Virgin Mary, or Jesus staring up at me. Could I really toss Christ into the trash can? Now I get why some religions don’t allow for the replication of any image of their prophets. Sure, it is partially about avoiding worship of false idols. But it also avoids the whole, what-to-do-with-this-calendar-of-our-God-once-the-year-is-over fiasco. Then again, I’m sure Jesus wouldn’t care. He probably gets sick of seeing his face plastered all over Hallmark greeting cards anyway, since I'm guessing he probably is not getting a cut. Also, I'm pretty sure no newborn baby that just got popped out into a manger of hay would have ivory skin, a cherub smile, and a full mop of golden curls. So, when you think about it, these aren’t even actual pictures of Jesus. They are just pictures of a one of those Precious Moments figurines, pretending to be Jesus in some greeting card holiday pageant. That’s right. No violation of papal law to toss these. And with that final thought, I drop them into the trash can and continued to de-Christmasfy my kitchen.
Then I couldn't stop thinking of Jesus … sitting down there … in the dark …. by those Kleenexes and broken egg shells. He probably hates it down there. Visions of Jesus crawling out of the trash can, that donkey of his giving him a boost, only to sneak up on me in the family room and rap my toes with that golden halo of his.
The hardest part sometimes is remembering how everything looked before all this silver and gold had infiltrated one’s home. This year I had to search through my pictures for references about where a particular fake fig tree went. And everything does look a little bare for a few days afterwards, like some sort of Decoration Withdrawal. The corner where the tree was looks especially barren. And a little dark, now that all of the twinkling lights of the tree are gone. Come to think of it … maybe it could use a lamp…
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