| At the end of November, my plain,
normal, ordinary English teaching wife went mad.
She whistled tunes about a fat guy,
deer that stand in the rain and told me not to be naughty because I
was being watched.
She cluttered the breakfast table with
holly until I could not find my cereal bowl.
Eggnog filled each and every shelf in
the refrigerator and all my root beer had been banished to the pantry.
I awakened to smell the chestnuts.
It was too late to change her or find a
cure, I married a Christmas Nut!
As soon as I forked down the last slice
of Thanksgiving pumpkin pie into my gullet and licked the plate clean
of whipped cream, she began pleading with me to take her to the Town
Pub to see their yearly Christmas decorations.
I shuddered at the thought of what would
happen when she finally wore me down.
The folks at the Town Pub smiled when we
entered but I sensed their apprehension of what she'd do. Her eyes
brightened and her jaw dropped when we walked into the dining room.
Lights were strung across the ceiling, down walls, behind specialty
beer mirrors and across cash registers.
In every other place lights twinkled
challenging the Great White Way. Wreaths of berries and pinecones of
every size competed for attention.
Evergreen pervaded the haze of
afternoon cigars. Plastic Santas stared from points of prominence and
a sign on a big bag of wrapped gifts read, "Do not open 'til
Christmas."
I guided her to an empty seat but she
could not sit. "I'll nail your shoes to the floor if you touch one
piece of tinsel," I whispered behind a smile.
"That wreath is a little crooked," she
said, starting to rise to it.
"Look, if they wanted Oleg Cassini or
Laura Ashley to help them get Christmas spirit, they would have called
them to Bloomfield.
She settled back into her chair and
passed the night in wide-eyed appreciation of the season. She would
need the winter recess to get that look off her face.
Her 125 students had it much worse than
me. They began their Christmas projects before their turkeys were in
the oven.
"Prewrite, write, rewrite. How many
reindeer does Santa have?
"A noun is a person, place or thing. A
stocking is a thing. Stocking is a noun. How many presents will fit
into a stocking before it falls off the mantel? Mantel is a noun.
"Class, your essay today will be on the
best Christmas gift you've ever given someone."
And so on until the children are finally
spared by Christmas holiday.
Her classroom makes "season's greetings"
cards pale by comparison. In it she has a Christmas scene painting
nine feet wide and four feet tall that one of 'her kids' made.
Whether or not there was room for more
decorations, there was also a green paper tree seven feet high, and
two dozen bells, angels, poinsettias and holly wreaths.
When the principal said her room was
attractive, he was calculating the cost of custodians' overtime to get
back to the bare bulletin boards. And another thought struck him as he
wondered if he would ever find the door back to the hallway.
The last time I found the door in our
apartment, we spent a week one night driving all around town to find
just the right tree to squeeze back through a doorway half its size.
My wife did the pointing and I did the lugging.
Once the tree was secured in the tin
watering stand, I held the ornament box while she did the hanging. I
tried to help her fill bare spots.
She directed me to turn the tree so that
our neighbors on Mary Street could see through our window how
beautiful our tree was. She wouldn't stop her ritual until she dropped
from exhaustion.
Her favorite way to pass an evening is
to turn off all the house lamps and stare at tiny blinking lights
hidden in the pine needles and tinsel on our live tree.
No matter how perfect I think the tree
is, she can always find the one ornament she had the lapse in judgment
to let me hang while she sipped eggnog in another room.
When she reassigns mine, it knocks all
of hers out of sync. She could kill a whole night because of my help.
Even at that, she spends hours every night trying to get the light and
sparkle 'just right.'
The only thing worse than all the
decorating is shopping in crowds of people who, like myself, shop only
one month a year.
I drove my wife to every store she could
think of, but she still could not find every thing she needed to
finish shopping before Thanksgiving.
She said it was my fault that she didn't
have all her shopping done before the seasonal procrastinators. She
wondered what she had gotten into when she married me.
"You have as much interest in shopping
as a log does," she cursed me.
I knew she would fall flat any second.
How long could such a tiny tiger keep up this pace? "What a match we
make," I said, "the Christmas Nut and the Christmas log -- "
She looked about to strike.
" -- we could do wonders by a
fireplace."
She smiled, took me up on my idea, and
Christmas has never been the same.
Dec. 22, 1977 - The
Independent Press of Bloomfield.
Ornamental Disorder,
11/92 - New Jersey Monthly.
Adapted from:
By Anthony Buccino
Published by
Cherry Blossom Press
PO Box
110252
Nutley NJ 07110
Copyright © 1977-2008 by Anthony Buccino. All rights reserved.
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