Happy Christmas

I have a love hate relationship with the holidays. I would love them, except that I hate being stuck in crowds of people, I hate tinny music being piped through crowds of people, I hate crowds of people who don't see me for a whole year and then spend hours trying to snuggle with my non-snuggly, stranger-phobic, over-tired baby and, I especially hate, crowds of mean people who are running around like crazy trying to get the last

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for their kids who are going to play with it for two weeks and then start whining again because something better just came out. Unfortunately, it doesn't get any better when married to a technogeek who spends the whole year dreaming of the newest gadgets he can get with his Christmas money and then, when he gets them, starts talking about the next, best, thing.

I think it irks me so much because I was one of those kids and, as an adult, I love getting on my soap box about the evils of consumerism and then benefiting from the super cool new things that are in my house (6-disc DVD changer? So you are telling me that I could sit on my ass and watch all three extended versions of the Lord of the Rings without ever leaving the couch? GLORY!!)

So, for the last three years of our marriage, we have not had a Christmas tree. They are messy, and a hassle, and we usually end up contemplating divorce in the process of getting it aligned in the stand correctly, and we have a million more reasons not to have one. But this year, after being out in the garishly decorated stores with Andrew and watching him try to twist his head around like an owl to see all the lights I started to reconsider.

Maybe having a child would help me find an appropriate balance between a childish holiday mania and detached ambiguity. Maybe I could see Christmas the way it is supposed to be. Maybe I will just turn my child into a whining brat who needs every single thing he sees on TV. Maybe I should get a Christmas tree.

So I did. I got a little, four foot, fake tree and put it up while Andrew screamed in his crib because I was trying to get him to take a nap early so that we could go Christmas shopping at an appointed time with my friend Jessie. Merry fucking Christmas.