Christmas Eve Eve… My children are coming to Georgia for Christmas. I’m so excited I didn’t sleep last night. I was so exhausted on the dangerous, mountain road to Helen (I had to go there to pick up a chicken pot pie – don’t ask…) I had to slap myself and roll down the windows and sing the Big Lots’ Christmas song that’s stuck in my head… It was actually reminiscent of Christmas’s of old, when I’d sit in my walk-in closet, drink, wrap gifts all night and then try to function the next day.
My sober approach to preparing for the arrival of my offspring is not much different from my drunken preparations – a cross between Skipping Christmas (when they find out their daughter is coming home) and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
As Kim says, “You always take things just a little too far…”
I was up in a tree this evening. I had decided that my Herculean, festive efforts inside were not enough… I was stringing lights in the tree house that was built around an enormous oak, twenty feet above the ground. I had decided that the ideal time to attempt an outdoor light display, was in the dark when it was pouring rain. Picture me feeling the ends of the tangled light globs blindly, as I tried to loop them around the huge rope bridges and parapets, maneuvering around a massive tree trunk and tenuously toe-poking for fear of falling through the ladder hole and breaking both my legs…
Three times I got to the end of a complicated attachment of five strings of 100 twinkle lights (well, less than that because I kept stepping on them and crushing them in the dark), ready to plug them into the female end of the extension cord, only to find I had the female end of the light string as well. Impossibly, three times.
By the time I gave up and left the wad of impenetrable lights high in the tree, I was soaked (oh yeah, I was planning on plugging the whole mess in wet…), my hands were blue and numb and I was whimpering. Then I got scared that a bear might think I was a wounded raccoon or something and climb the tree and eat me so I put one hand over my mouth to stop the mewling and clung with the other hand to the ladder rungs, defeated.
But I’m sitting here with a club soda in a wine glass and thinking – if I hook all the lights together first and leave the male end of the plug at the finishing point, dangling – and work backwards – I should be able to produce a winter wonderland by midnight when Jon Jon and Kallie arrive.
Never say die…
Today I’m not drinking, because it’s almost Christmas!
How come you’re not drinking?
