I find myself in a weird place. No, I’m not back in Florida, though that would certainly be weird.
Instead, I find myself strangely in the Christmas spirit. Usually, I begrudgingly get in somewhat of a Christmas mood after Thanksgiving. I’ve even gone so far as to go to the Macy’s Christmas Parade on the day after Thanksgiving. No, not the one in New York City. That would be another weird place for me. I’m talking about the one in Seattle.
Oh, sure, I’ll put up the Christmas tree and go through the motions. Whether I have been in a relationship or not, there has almost always been a tree involved, even when I was in my most Grinchiest of moods. I’ve experienced the entire holiday tree gambit, from going out to a tree farm and cutting a tree down to buying a fur tree in Florida. No, that’s not a misspelling on my part, but on the part of the store I purchased it from down south. It seems that they don’t really understand coniferous trees, though I would pay very good money to see a real fur tree.
Last year, it was the Christmas from hell. I don’t think I’ve had a worse holiday experience, even though I was on vacation for two weeks from work. You’d think that would put anyone in the holiday spirit, but when you’re sinking into the depths of another hellish relationship, even a relatively new one, it can put quite a cramper on any holiday, especially Christmas.
Parker and I made it through, thankfully. But I certainly wasn’t looking forward to any more holidays like that one. Even in my deepest depths of despair I’ve managed to have better Christmases.
Well, enough of looking back. I only bring it up because it had set my expectations for more holiday misery going forward. Thankfully, as we all know, the hand of God reached down from the heavens and bitch slapped me into coming to my senses and lo and behold, the tides all changed in January and I found the girl I was born to love.
I’m guessing that this is what has put me in such an unusual holiday spirit. I have had a firm rule that there’s to be absolutely no Christmas in the house until after Thanksgiving. This has been rigidly followed until a week ago, when I was home ill.
I do that from time to time, have a complete physical and mental breakdown that would be best described as burnout. I don’t take many vacations during the year, except for a long weekend here and there, so I eventually crash and burn.
With nothing to do but lounge around in bed healing, I turned on the TV. As I scrolled through the 500 channels I have, most in foreign languages for whatever reason, I came upon the Hallmark Channel. At first I resisted the marathon of obscure Christmas movies, but then I couldn’t resist tuning into one, thinking that I would become bored so quickly that I would pass out.
I didn’t. I watched it. Then the one after that and the one after that. Slowly, I came to realize that my entire outlook on life had been reset and that I couldn’t wait for the holiday season to start.
Mind you, this includes Thanksgiving. As we all know though, there aren’t a lot of great Thanksgiving movies out there, unless you want to spend some time with the Waltons and watch how much fun the Great Depression was for everyone.
Yes, the endless sequels of Thanksgiving on Walton’s Mountain came on later in the day, but by 3 p.m., shortly after the end of Santa Jr., I had had my fill of holiday TV shows.
Thanksgiving does get gypped here. There’s no trick or treat component, the kind that makes Halloween so fun. There are no costumes either, unless you want to dress as a Pilgrim or an Indian. There aren’t any presents either at Thanksgiving. It’s primarily an eating holiday, the day when we all get together to eat ourselves into a hypnotic stupor and then complain that we ate too much.
I’m certainly good with that. I really am looking forward to Thanksgiving with my new family. I am quite confident that it will be the best Thanksgiving ever, if for no other reason than I get to spend it with Kat.
Still, Christmas is beginning to sneak into my head. It has nothing to do with presents either. Last year it was all about presents because quite frankly, there was nothing else to look forward to.
But this year, it’s the whole Christmas spirit thing. I readily admit that I am having to fight the urge to turn on a Christmas station on Pandora or tune into my favorite Christmas station, Soma FM’s Xmas in Frisko, filled with all the irreverent holiday songs that never get any airtime on a traditional radio (is that still around?) station.
I am even happy that our trip to Key West will force us to put the tree up a week early. I have tried to stick to the first weekend in December as the time to pull out all the decorations and assemble the sustainable holiday tree. But we’ll be in KW that weekend so we have to decorate earlier this year.
Darn! I’m really excited for us to decorate our first tree together, blending all the ornaments and decorations for the first time so we can see if it’s just as oddly matched as the rest of our furnishings and decor. I am even looking forward to climbing on the very tall ladder to put up lights outside, something I have always resisted as well.
Who knows? Maybe all this Grinch stuff was just because I was always in the wrong place at the wrong time of year. The holidays always seemed more like a chore than a blessing, and occasionally just a wretched obligation that I had to endure so that someone else would like me.
Thankfully, I have none of those worries today. And the holiday season burns brightly on the horizon, for the first time in a long time.
In the Emerald City, dreaming of eggnog,
– Robb