I love Christmas.
I'm one of those annoying people who get ridiculously happy at the sight of Christmas lights. If I had my way, my house would look like Santa vomited all over it. I love the lights, I love the decorations, I love the tree (real, sticky, messy, half frozen, pain-in-the-ass tree) ... I'm that person.
However, my other half is not. He's the person who, when malls begin playing Christmas Carols on loop, wants to strangle people like me. Or stick me in a box, wrap it up, and ship it off to Antarctica where he no longer has to deal with the lights, decorations, tree and annoyingly perky attitudes. In part, this is because he works in retail, and so Christmas is his own personal Vietnam. But it goes deeper than that, to before he worked in a mall being hounded by Christmas cheer. He just does not like Christmas.
So we compromise. I get over enthusiastic and run up our electricity bill with lights, and he shuts up and allows it. He wants nothing to do with gift buying or wrapping, so I happily put on some music and build a fort in the living room out of wrapping paper, tape and ribbon. Honestly, with his retail hours I consider myself a widow until mid-January, so it works out fairly well. I can explode in Christmas cheer, he can Scrooge it up, and we can reconvene in the new year and bond over other shared interests.
This year, however, it looked as if his Scrooge-ness was going to win. We're in a smaller house, so our gorgeous 7 foot tall Christmas tree can't be resurrected from the basement because it won't fit. Then the cats went and peed on it, so we had to toss the whole thing out - tree, wreath, garlands. The whole lot. (I love real Christmas trees, he thinks it's cruel to kill a tree for a holiday - so I get a big tree, but it has to be fake. Love is all about compromise.)
That's alright, I said. We barely spend any time at home during the holidays anyway. We're over at his family's, then his sister's, then my brother's... our place is much too small to host a Christmas anything, and with no kids the onus of travel falls to us. We don't need no stinkin' tree to enjoy Christmas! I still have the lights!
Then he had a dental emergency. A panicked appointment, followed by two months of visits and fixes and work wracked us up over $5000 of dental crap. It had to be done, no help for it. And I'm an obsessive compulsive squirrel when it comes to hoarding money, so we could afford it. But it was tight. So, no tree, no plans to buy a new tree or anywhere to put it, far less money than we had planned, and an increasingly cranky hubby facing a month of close-combat style Christmas retail insanity with ongoing tooth ache on the side (our dentist is amazing and was a miracle worker in his mouth, but with his teeth shifting around and the amount of work done, the recovery is long and painful.)
So I was feeling distinctly un-Christmasy. My mother was visiting soon, which meant my house was a chaos of cleaning. My school work was piling up and I was going to have to juggle final exams with two jobs, the dojo training, my mother, and my newly returned-to-the-country brother and his son. And a tooth-cranky hubby. And his family. And what on earth was I going to buy everyone and when on earth was I going to do it!?
The stress levels were high. The Christmas spirit was low.
It was in this frame of mine that I trudged home from an excruciatingly long day. It was cold, it was wet, I was wallowing in some self pity. Maybe because of all this, I was looking for a reason to love Christmas again.
I moped. Hubby and I had a long talk about our finances, and decided that we could do it. He wanted to buy presents and we would stretch our budget to accommodate, since the one area we agree on completely when it comes to Christmas is that the giving is a million times more important than the getting. I could bake cookies, which would supplement our low-income gift giving. We could put Christmas lights on the fake ficus and make it our gimpy Christmas tree. We could do this.
Then I did something dumb.
To be continued...
