Honey! Why Don't You Put On the Eulogy Log?

So you're all probably sick of the holiday posts and whatnot, now that the new year has started already.

Well, too bad!

I'm a procrastinator, which means you're just getting my Christmas-related posts now.

Maybe you can't see it, but I'm sticking my tongue out and giving you a great big raspberry.

*thbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb*

 No, my tongue is not normally that color! I just finished eating a candy cane, if you must know, and apparently some color transference occurred.

Like many people around the world, as December approaches it means digging out all the red, green, silver, gold and white colored decorations and dumping them all about the house. It means untangling all those christmas lights and praying that they still work. It means that your January credit card statements will be horrifying when they arrive.

That's a bit melancholy...I'm sure you're all great budgeters and diligently save up every year well ahead of the holidays in order to buy all your presents in cash. For those who forgo present-buying for whatever reason....you suck. Only because I'm jealous, not because you don't buy into a religious holiday that's been hijacked by the retail industry (or whatever reason you don't do gifting in December).

Personally, my favorite part about this (past) time of year all comes down to trees and lights. I wish we were the kind of family that put up amazing displays of electricity-guzzling lights, but we aren't. Mostly because that would require 1) owning said lights to put up and 2) going outside in Minnesota in the winter on an aluminum ladder to put up the damn things. Luckily for us, we have a great excuse: we only own enough strands to light up our Christmas tree. Being broke is great!

However, there is one thing I don't want to go without, lights or no lights. Christmas requires a tree. A REAL tree! One that will fill the house with the lovely scent of sap and pine, one that requires daily stooping to fill the tree stand which inevitably gets sap in your hair, one that must eventually be placed outside for the garbage man to pick up (or placed ever-so-carefully in the firepit, whereupon it will sit until it turns entirely brown and uber-dry, where it will sit until I get the itch to light it up in one big, brief bonfire).

As a family unit, the Big B and I are small potatoes. Just us two and our two furry four-legged feline children (I don't count the albino, blond and regular ordinary gray squirrels Ghost Face, Blondie or the Godfather as part of our "family" although they do freeload off our property). As such, we don't have much in the way of holiday decorations or traditions yet.

We're slowly accumulating them, however. It's a weird transition to go from the traditions of your parents as you were growing up to meshing them with someone else's traditions. Candy canes on the tree? Not done in my childhood home, but the Big B will steal several from his mom's house to put on our tree (I think he does this more to satisfy his sweet tooth than for the tradition). Candy in the stockings come Christmas morning? Again, something new but not unwelcome, oh no! Not at all.

One of the first traditions we started since moving into the more spacious upstairs of our current home was to get a bona-fide tree from a lot nearby each year. We go with my mom and Bonus Dad each time which has become a new tradition of it's own (plus, they own a nice big Jeep on which to cart our tree safely home).

My mom and I run around the lot, looking for the scraggliest of trees possible. I was taught that short-needled and hole-y trees are the best for ornaments, because the holes in the foliage allow you to place those pesky heavy ones on a stronger part of the bough, ensuring that ornament loss does not occur.

The plus side is that the uglier the tree is, the cheaper! A win-win situation.

This year we ended up going with an F-Fur, and no, I can't remember what the "F" stood for. I want to say Ferngus Fur, but that can't be right...

It doesn't look that Charlie Brown-esque, but this little tree was a great bargain.

Of course, the cats love the tree too. Thank goodness neither tries to climb it, they being primarily indoor cats for most of their lives.

Alabama is a connoisseur of sap-water and will be drinking from the tree stand until this baby comes down. She's got a junk-food disposition, being a lover of popcorn, flaming hot Cheetos and Ritz crackers, so it's excusable that she finds the sweet sap water to her taste.

Gizmo, unfortunately, is, to put it frankly, a little shit. Everything about the tree is tantalizing to him, from the tree-stand water delicacy, to the new ornamental "toys" and finally the fact that he can sharpen his non-existent claws on the corner of the tree stand. He was instantly curious as we set it up and hung around watching intently as we put the lights and ornaments on.

Sharpen those imaginary claws!

I had an adorable picture from last year where he tangled himself up in the lights and just gave up and laid down, but in my impatience I didn't want to hunt for it.

The Big B moans and groans when it comes time to decorate the tree. The first year he got out of having to do anything but get the tree stand up from the basement. Last year he had to put the lights on (something that was traditionally done by my dad growing up) but got out of putting on the ornaments. This year I was resolute; we would be decorating that tree together, dammit!

After grabbing our little ferngus tree it was still daylight and the Big B convinced me to wait until dark to start decorating. I warned him that I would be finding the Yule Log burning show on cable and we would have it on in the background as we hung the ornaments.

(The yule log fireplace TV program is something of an inside joke in my family, made even funnier by the fact that our TV hangs over an actual fireplace).




The Big B...I love him (duh) but his grasp of language has a few holes in it (who doesn't know the word "posh"? Honestly!). As I started to carefully unpack my box of ornaments he says to me:

"Honey, didn't you want to put the eulogy log show on while we decorate?"

Ah, my sweetie! I knew he wasn't kidding by the straight face he maintained while he said it. Of course, this became a running joke for the rest of the night, as he continued to refer to it as the "eulogy log".

When I found a "psychedelic yule log" On Demand through my cable box I just had to play it because it was so bizarre.

Too bad the picture was blurry, but at least you can see the pretty rainbow colors!



The weird techno/electronica/bad 80's synth music accompanying it wasn't the least bit Christmas-y but it was good for a hoot, leading to some more silliness as we put the lights on.

Sorry some of these are blurry...stupid camera!

 

Ah, doesn't he look (fuzzily) proud?

Eventually the lights were wound exactly right around our little ferngus tree and the ornaments were all placed evenly about the tree, with the favorite ones front and center.

My family was all about the unique ornaments, never the generic-looking Christmas balls, bows or tinsel.

Plus Gizmo would almost certainly eat the tinsel if we had it, and then I'd be cleaning a litterbox full of glittery poop.

There are some ornaments I especially love, and I was willing to fight my mom and sister in a death match to get them when we split up the ornaments between us (not that they fought me over them, me being the one with the weird rainbow/mushroom obsession).

Not a very good picture, but you can see why this is my

absolute FAVORITE ornament, can't you?

The clown ornament on the right is a genuine antique. We had many of these antique ornaments, but lost many when our lopsidedly decorated tree fell over one year. Luckily, the fantastic clown ornament was spared destruction.


Finally I placed the stumps from each of our trees from years past on the tree skirt. Another tradition I had completely good intentions about doing but somehow never got around to actually completing, the plan was to engrave in some fashion the years on each of the stumps to chronicle each new Christmas. I can still tell them apart by their size and shape, but if I don't get to putting the years on soon, that knowledge will eventually be lost.

All of this excitement had gotten to the Gizzy, who retreated to his "safety zone".

Personally, I think it was to disarm us about his closeness to the tree. At the time of this picture, ornaments were spaced evenly around the tree, top to bottom, front to back. As the weeks have passed, the ornaments have slowly been moved higher and higher, in an effort to keep Gizmo from accessing them and using them as new toys.

He's a beast and has broken several ornaments and a musical statue of Tiny Tim and his father, but he gets away with it cuz he's so darn cute and because he has his momma's eyes.