A Moment of Dark Humor...

Yeah, I laugh about all this stuff now...hope it gives you a weird little chuckle also...

The Christmas Tree

We always had the same Christmas tree when I was going up with my a-parents...My a-mom found it in the town dump (our version of Wal-Mart) and always thought it was one of the best finds of her entire life. It was one of those trees from the 60's that basically looked like it was made from pipe cleaners and wire.  She thought that if she laid enough tinsel on it that it magically looked 'real'....child cynic I was,it always just looked like a pile of tinsel on a very fake tree to me.

My a-dad made no bones about the fact that he hated Christmas, particulary since the tree had to be by the TV (no matter how little money we had, he made sure we had cable, that way, he wouldn't miss wrestling). He'd be doing is weird little squat in his Laz-e-boy (how apt) every Christmas before the kids got downstairs, waiting to pounce. ..Because he just KNEW we would stand in front of 'his' TV.

Every year since I could remember he made a little game of throwing the entire Christmas tree out into the yard. Sometimes he'd wait until the gifts were opened, sometimes he'd start out the festivities with the annual 'tree toss'. A few times he also threw the gifts out into the snow...but as we usually just got things like socks, we were able to easily retrieve them and go onto our Christmas lunch of canned ham.

Without fail, my a-mom would be in tears because her 'beautiful' tree was out in the yard. All the 'exquisite' ornaments she had collected from the Salvation Army store and various 'free-please take' boxes would be broken. My brother and I would be put in charge of gathering what tinsel we could from the snow drifts and drying it out to be used next year.

As we got to be young teens, when Christmas would roll around, my brother and I would make bets on exactly on far into Christmas day the tree would last.  The loser had to haul in buckets of coal. When I was 15, the tradition changed, forever.

My a-mom managed to somehow gather only plastic ornaments during her summer scavaging expeditions, and had cleverly wired them to the tree, We were unaware of this because she was the only one allowed to decorate it, the children were to 'stupid' to do it correctly.

When the tree toss came, the expression on a-mom's face was happy...she waited for a-dad to come back in and squat on his chair then cheerfully walked out into the snow and retrieved the tree. Some tinsel was missing and badly ruffled, but ALL the ornaments were INTACT,. She triumphantly thrust it back into the tree holder with a loud "HA!".

A-dad was strangely quiet for a moment.

A-mom looked at him and said, "I wired it with all plastic ornaments this year, asshole."

A-dad was quiet again.

Then he said, "Touche, Sandra, touche." He was strangely calm the rest of the day.

When next Christmas rolled around, he didn't even move from his chair until lunch, although he did do some profanity laced ranting, which was pretty normal. Risking death later that night, my brother asked if he would be throwing the tree anytime soon (wagers had been made after all).

A-dad said, rather sadly, "No. That woman went and took all the thrill out of it last year."