Today, I hung tinsel on the Christmas tree. It was Chad's request. It was something he remembered fondly about the trees of his childhood. And as I opened the package, I was suddenly aware that I hadn't hung tinsel in all my adult life. Had it gone out of fashion? Had I just been too lazy to do it all these years? Who knew.
As I pulled out the first strands of tinsel, the stress came back in a vertigo shot (you know that shot in a movie where the actor suddenly realizes something and the background zooms while the actor stays the same size?) I flashed back to myself from probably 4th grade to my senior year of high school. The trimming of the tree in my house was a looked-forward-to event that always seemed to have a dark side.
There was the lighting nightmare. Year after year my father cursed and growled at the tangled mass of Christmas tree lights in his hands. They seemingly had no end or beginning. Or they had so many ends sticking out from every direction that he had no idea where to start. Every year he tried a new method of putting them away that might yield less stress the next year. There was the lights around the coffee can year. The lights around the extension cord frame year. There was even a year when dad was ahead of his time and just put the tree up with the lights still in it. Thank goodness for pre-lit trees. They saved our family.
There was the yearly garland conundrum, where mom tried new and innovative ways to strand the garland. Up and down the tree. Sort of tucked into the tree. Plain slapped onto the tree (when Derrick was in charge).
There was the ornament instruction each year. Ornaments were to be hung evenly from front to back and top to bottom. My ornaments were rehung every year as I never quite seemed to grasp the spacial concept my mom was going for.
But among all these stresses, none topped the tinsel. I dreaded tinsel time like no other. There were rules about how many strands were in one toss. There was a wrist flick method that escaped my mastery. There was the 'purposeful randomness.' You know what I'm talking about? My mom wanted the tinsel to look randomly placed - in a perfect way. We spent more time trying to make the tinsel look whimsical than we spent getting the tree out of the attic, watching dad hurl expletives around the room while lighting the tree, and all the decorating prior to tinsel time. I never got it right. I'd toss a clump of tinsel. Or I'd let too much fall to the floor. Inevitably, my mom would relieve me from tinsel duty and exasperatedly strip me of my box of tinsel. I can close my eyes and see my mom with the tinsel in her hand - alone because the rest of us were more afraid of her in that moment than we were when Dad was in his scariest lighting rant. She was the Cruella de Vil of tinsel. Maniacally flicking her wrist and reworking where the errant strands had randomly landed to make them look more random.
At the end of the night, when the stress of the tree trimming was over and my mom and dad had had a chance to recover, we looked in awe at our tree. It was always magical. Perfectly whimsical. Sparkly and mesmerizing. And my mom always got up every morning after it was decorated to plug in the lights so that as I came into the living room each morning through Christmas, the shiny, beautiful tree was there to greet me. And the tinsel sparkled happily and I didn't remember the stress of its conception.
Until today. And instead of stressing, I smiled, threw clumps of tinsel this way and that, and concocted this blog post while I worked.
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