Humour: Amanda Blair’s family is pining for Christmas
It's time for the annual festive argument – but will Amanda Blair win this year?
We have this argument every year. My husband says he only likes the real ones. Says you can tell when they’re fake and it takes all the joy out of it. I disagree, saying that these days they make such good ones you’d never know the difference between the real ones and the fake ones, particularly if you’re just looking at them from a distance.
He says the fake ones just don’t feel the same and that they don’t “hang” well. He also says there’s no movement in them and that one of his great joys is to sit back at night with a beer and just watch them sway in the summer breeze …
Plus, he reckons they have a funny smell. This I agree with, but with fragrant products like “It’s a Pine Romance” and “Pine Time and Roses”, it’s easy to mask the smell of a plastic Christmas tree.
See, I vote plastic because I want a lowmaintenance tree. After ordering the ham, organising the Kris Kringle draw, making nativity scene costumes, getting tickets for everybody for the school concert and purchasing all the fragrant candles for the teachers, I don’t need another thing to worry about. I tell my husband bringing a real tree into the house is like bringing home a needy toddler. They require the right temperature and to be watered daily, and shielded from the sun lest they get too dry. Plus, like a toddler, they drop their crap everywhere (in this case their pine needles) and other people (me) has to pick it up.
He totally disagrees with my desire for artificial enhancement and says it’s just not Christmas without a real tree. Each year, he says he’s happy to take one arduous task off my list (isn’t he kind?), then sets about “doing research”, which entails frequent trips to Bunnings and to all the local fruit and veg shops, so he can check out the botanical booty. He measures, feels them up and counts the branches.
Then he puts them all back as he’s unsure if it’s the “right” one and doesn’t want to suffer post-purchase dissonance. I remind him that buyers regret isn’t that bad, hell,
I’ve been suffering since our wedding day.
But he can’t commit and his search for the perfect pine continues all through December. Daily, the children request status updates, but all he can say is he hasn’t yet found the tree that speaks to him. Meanwhile, our children speak to all the neighbours and tell them forlornly that Christmas hasn’t come to our house as their dad won’t buy them a tree.
This has an upside. They become the object of pity and receive invitations to everybody else’s house to help decorate their trees, which means they spend hours away from me = early Christmas present. Fa la la la la, la la la la!
So this year will be a repeat of last. Around 10am on Christmas Eve, I’ll start shouting about our lack of tree and the kids will become anxious. They already worry about how Father Christmas will get in, as we removed the chimneys during renovations and now the lack of a tree puts them in a spin.
Panicked, he’ll run to the shop and grab whatever’s left. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows him bringing home the lone leftover tree, bald in patches, missing a limb or two, skinny, with a wonky top that requires us to impale our poor Angel to get her to sit right.
We’ll throw everything in our decoration box at our tree, blinging it to the point we joke about calling it Brynne Edelsten. Finally, we turn on the Christmas lights and the kids squeal. Totally sucking up in a late attempt to curry favour from Santa, unprompted, they’ll thank their dad for getting the most beautiful tree in the street. He’ll smile smugly and I’ll bite my tongue, and somewhere in the distance I swear I’ll hear a sleigh bell ringing. This is the Christmas magic, the family magic, and there ain’t nothing fake about it.
Panicked, he’ll run to the shop and grab whatever’s left.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Amanda Blair lives in Adelaide with her four children and a husband she quite likes when she sees him. In her spare time, she talks a lot.