A wise person – if not Gandhi, then probably Dear Abby – once wrote that the perfect Christmas could take more than one year to celebrate.
Important and time-consuming elements can be parceled out over several years to avoid fatigue: One year to put up the perfect tree and bake cookies, the next to focus on outdoor lighting and Christmas carols, a third to doll up gifts with ribbons and bows, and so on.
When one looks back over the years, these memories will blur together to create the “perfect” Christmas.
I can buy that – a slacker philosophy disguised as new-age wisdom.
That being the case, I guess this is my year for outdoor lighting and Christmas carols, not because last year I erected a pristine tree and baked 50 dozen gingerbread men, but because the weather was accommodating for the lights and I can’t escape the carols if I tried.
Temperatures approached 60 degrees the day I decked my halls, leading to two firsts – the first time I have decorated wearing only a T-shirt (OK, I wore pants and shoes, too, but you knew that, didn’t you?) and the first time I ventured on top of the porch roof.
My porch isn’t high, but for a guy who cries “Mommy” when he gets to the third rung on a step ladder, tiptoeing onto it is akin to rappelling down the side of the Alps.
It didn’t help that I had three strands of icicle lights underfoot and a wife who kept calling up from the safety of the ground, “Be careful. Your cousin’s porch is the same height, and somebody died falling off of it.”
(Little plastic fixtures under the shingles: $5. Holiday lights: $25. A loving and supportive spouse: Priceless. For everything else…)
Obviously, I survived. If the weather holds, the silly things are coming down next Tuesday, before an ice storm or some other freak of nature cements them up there until Easter, no matter how Grinchly it makes me look in the neighborhood,.
But I said this is also my year for Christmas carols. Friends and family need not worry: I’m not singing door to door. I know my voice can curl an elephant’s nose hairs, falling as it does somewhere between Michael Bolton and truly awful. (Not that Bolton is far from truly awful himself, but I digress.)
No, I’ve been (ital.) listening (end ital.) to carols this year, which puts me more in mind of Groundhog’s Day than Christmas, since there are only about a dozen songs that get played to death between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.
Take “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays” – please (with apologies to Henny Youngman). We have perfectly acceptable Perry Como versions (he recorded two), a not-quite-so-acceptable Carpenters version, and a truly frightening Jim Nabors’ rendition, which proves that even a guy with great pipes can’t escape the long shadow of Gomer Pyle, USMC.
I’ve heard all of them this season, and I could probably live a long and happy life without ever hearing any of them again.
Not all carols affect me that way. I like “Silent Night” (the less instrumentation the better), “Deck the Halls” (those fa-la-la’s get me every time), and even “Frosty the Snowman,” although it’s more of a winter song with a little snatch of Christmas thrown in at the end.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to albums by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a mostly Christmas hard rock/heavy metal band that dresses up classical pieces with a lot of three-chord bombast, cheesy lyrics, and production values reminiscent of Queen. The results are sometimes tacky and gaudy, but it stirs blood made sluggish by too much eggnog, I tell ya.
Yet even those guys I’m weary of by Dec. 25. I’m fickle that way.
Probably the only Christmas song I can listen to repeatedly, even in June, is “Father Christmas” by the Kinks. It perfectly captures the madness of the holiday consumer season and the gulf between the haves and have-nots.
The song is loud and a little depressing, just like Christmas is sometimes, even when you’re assigning parts to different years to avoid total Yuletide burnout.
Merry Christmas to you and yours, and if you see some guy being pushed down the street in a full body cast next week, humming disjointed lyrics like “Father Christmas, give me some money!” that will be me.
At least you’ll know I took down my lights.
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