Xmas
We got the Christmas tree up last night. We had the Annual Christmas Fight.
All the major fights of the marriage have names -- but the Christmas Fight is the only one that reoccurs on a dependable basis, like Old Faithful. It generally, though not always, involves putting up the tree, and often specifically has to do with the lights, usually being brought on by the process of detangling them and replacing bulbs. We actually avoid it some years, but not this. This year is was brought on by the build-up of a number of things, but the crowning touch was a net that the place that sold us our tree uses to wrap the tree for transport. This year it caught on: my husband's coat button; the car trunk while being loaded; the car trunk while being unloaded; my husband's coat button; my husband's other coat button;, the screen door; the coat button (this after having been previously detangled), the second coat button, the third coat button, the fourth coat button. Then later, when I tried the tree in the stand to see if we needed to cut off any branches at the bottom, it tangled up in the stand. The pressure built and eventually the top blew off...
My mother said there are certain fights in every marriage that if the marriage survives, it can survive anything. For her and my dad it was once re-wallpapering a bathroom in the old days before self-stick or pre-glued wallpaper, when first you steamed off the old stuff and then you mixed paste and stuck up the new. In old style wallpapering if the paste is too dry, it doesn't stick, and if too runny, it falls down, and even with more modern "easier" wallpapers you still have to measure and cut out all the little notches where window trim and pipes and other weird protuberances occur. And match the pattern if it has one. Their marriage survived, barely, the repapering of the bathroom, possibly because by the end of it divorce was too good for the other person involved. Killing them was too good for them, too. Perhaps Chinese water torture might have been appropriate?
According to my dad, his parents' make or break fight was the yearly take-down-the-stovepipe-for-the-summer chore, back in the days before the family farmhouse had central heating when it was dependent on a woodstove -- it had something to do with soot that tended to go all over the kitchen in the process.
So anyway we got the tree up. And decorated. And the marriage survived and so has the husband, though it was probably a good thing he had already gone off in disgust by the time I had to detangle the eight strings of lights he had tangled all together (!) when he took the tree down last year, thinking he was doing me an enormous favor. And the Annual Christmas Fight is over for another year ... with the marriage intact.
All the major fights of the marriage have names -- but the Christmas Fight is the only one that reoccurs on a dependable basis, like Old Faithful. It generally, though not always, involves putting up the tree, and often specifically has to do with the lights, usually being brought on by the process of detangling them and replacing bulbs. We actually avoid it some years, but not this. This year is was brought on by the build-up of a number of things, but the crowning touch was a net that the place that sold us our tree uses to wrap the tree for transport. This year it caught on: my husband's coat button; the car trunk while being loaded; the car trunk while being unloaded; my husband's coat button; my husband's other coat button;, the screen door; the coat button (this after having been previously detangled), the second coat button, the third coat button, the fourth coat button. Then later, when I tried the tree in the stand to see if we needed to cut off any branches at the bottom, it tangled up in the stand. The pressure built and eventually the top blew off...
My mother said there are certain fights in every marriage that if the marriage survives, it can survive anything. For her and my dad it was once re-wallpapering a bathroom in the old days before self-stick or pre-glued wallpaper, when first you steamed off the old stuff and then you mixed paste and stuck up the new. In old style wallpapering if the paste is too dry, it doesn't stick, and if too runny, it falls down, and even with more modern "easier" wallpapers you still have to measure and cut out all the little notches where window trim and pipes and other weird protuberances occur. And match the pattern if it has one. Their marriage survived, barely, the repapering of the bathroom, possibly because by the end of it divorce was too good for the other person involved. Killing them was too good for them, too. Perhaps Chinese water torture might have been appropriate?
According to my dad, his parents' make or break fight was the yearly take-down-the-stovepipe-for-the-summer chore, back in the days before the family farmhouse had central heating when it was dependent on a woodstove -- it had something to do with soot that tended to go all over the kitchen in the process.
So anyway we got the tree up. And decorated. And the marriage survived and so has the husband, though it was probably a good thing he had already gone off in disgust by the time I had to detangle the eight strings of lights he had tangled all together (!) when he took the tree down last year, thinking he was doing me an enormous favor. And the Annual Christmas Fight is over for another year ... with the marriage intact.