During one of my afternoon chats with my mother, she informed me that my grandmother wanted to leave the table-top artificial Christmas tree up all year long and simply change out the decorations. Hearts for February, shamrocks for March, Easter eggs for Easter - you get the idea. Apparently there was a 'dead space' in their living room and with Christmas just around the corner she thought it would be nice to just leave the tree up. Now I've been studying Feng Shui on and off for several years now. I am by no means an expert and I also lack the attention span to keep anything decluttered for more than 10 minutes. But I do keep a steady stream of specifically colored flowers, Chinese coins, and faceted crystals coming into the house. I change the colors of things to enact 'cures', I prepare vision boards, and I say mantras. My husband lovingly ignores it most of the time and I find I can answer any question as to why I bought gold ink pens, or something equally random, with two words: "Feng Shui".
I read somewhere that you should take down your Christmas tree before New Year's Day so that you don't carry over the energies from the previous year into the next. Or something like that. Before the kids came along and probably a few years into at least the first one I saved the tree demolition for either the week after New Year's, and one fateful year I even took it down on New Year's Day. That was a pretty rough year. Then I decided that the New Year's day hangover would be a lot more tolerable if I didn't have the ghost of Christmas past to undecorate looming in my future. So I took it down on December 30th, and so the trend began. It wasn't until I did that for about two years that I learned it was actually bad to leave your tree up into the new year.
Now my grandmother has this nasty habit of doing ridiculous things in the Spring that tends to affect a large part of the family. Really goofy things, like breaking a hip or getting blood clots in her lungs and then really pushing the envelope by suggesting she might have lung cancer - something she still hasn't managed to prove. Silly girl. One Spring she ended up missing Anna's 1st Communion because she had better things to do, like being in the hospital getting injections of Heparin. Then she threatened to ruin my Disney vacation by throwing herself onto the garage ground and breaking a hip. I mean really. Is it that we aren't showing her enough attention??
Knowing that Emma's 1st Communion was coming up in the Spring, I needed to stop this bad Feng Shui train in it's tracks. She tried to give herself a terminal disease last year - I didn't want to see what she would do this year. Mom was no fan of this permanent Christmas tree idea but she thought maybe if she just let it go they'd get tired of it by March. Feng Shui made this unacceptable to me so obviously I had to put a call in to this interior decorating-challenged hypochondriac.
I began with a story that she gave me when I was 6. I can only imagine I had been pestering her for hours on December 24th, and for some reason it was just her and I. I guess everyone was out last minute shopping or something. Either way, I was bored, it was only 1:30, the Christmas presents were SCREAMING at me from under the tree, and all I really wanted was for it to be Christmas day. It was then that she explained "If every day was Christmas day then Christmas wouldn't be special." I suppose the fact that I didn't buy that when I was 6 should have clued me in to the fact that she wasn't going to take that either. "It's not a 'Christmas' tree if it's decorated differently! It's the decorations that make the difference!" I didn't have an answer for that. I mean, just because the box it came in clearly says 'Christmas tree' who the hell am I to judge?
So then, with trepidation, I began to dangle my Feng Shui. "It's bad luck," I told her. Then she released the venom. "What has Feng Shui ever done for you, is what I want to know! I'm not listening to a bunch of old Chinese people to tell me when to take my tree down! If I want to leave it up all year, I can! And take your ancient Chinese wisdom and shove it up your ass!" Alright so I added that last line but you're a fool if you don't think that's what she meant.
She went on to inform me that not only was this a great idea, but my mom LOVED it! Now she gets to go out and shop for hearts and shamrocks and flags and...and....turkeys...to hang off this non-Christmas tree that just happens to look exactly like a Christmas tree. "Your mother LOVES to shop!" Ok, yes, that's totally true but I can think of tons of more worthwhile things to shop for than year round Christmas decorations. Where do you even find turkey ornaments? And what is she putting on the tree in August? Sweat beads?
She had an answer for everything. She had a holiday in every month with a corresponding decoration that my mom would "LOVE" to shop for. I was already choking on my Feng Shui so I didn't dare bring that up again. She already tried to vocally annihilate me the first time I mentioned it. I had no other choice but to report back to my mom and let her know that she was on board with this fabulous new decorating trend and that she had a lot of shopping to do!
Dang, I wish I knew this before you made that call because I have another argument.
ReplyDeleteSee there was the Christmas the my brother was deployed to Iraq and my mom and I - well let's just say we were not much into Christmas. But when he called home he had good news he was going to be back in March or April.
Mom decided right then that we'd celebrate when he was home. and she'd just leave everything up till then. To many people this would be odd, but well, I am pretty convinced that my mom is an elf anyway - she has some artistic santas that live in a display case out year round; when we were kids the tree would often be up until the superbowl (which used to be in January); she starts getting excited about it in the summer... You get the idea.
Here's where reality sets in, do you have any idea how difficult it is to dust a Chirtmas tree? And the spiders - they loved it. webs everywhere. You'd knock them down and overnight they'd be back.
Just in case you get another go at arguing against...
I'll let them discover the cobwebs and bugs. All I can say is last year she didn't want to put up the tree at all and now she wants it up all the time.
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