My husband and I have been married for a long time.
A really long time.
As in, since God was a boy.
Well, not that long, but you get the picture.
And when you’ve been together with someone you love for many years, you think you know everything about that person. Their likes, dislikes; what makes them happy, and what doesn’t.
Until the day when you take time to go through all of your Christmas decorations and decide what to keep and what to purge. As I recently discovered, this will teach you a lot.
Since before we moved into the home we’re in now, every December, we’ve talked about how we want to take the time to go through all of our Christmas decorations. Why? If you’ve been decorating for many Christmases, you know exactly why: because for years, you’ve been using ugly stuff that you may not really even like anymore. Why? It’s easier to keep it and put it up during the chaos of the holiday season than to take the time to make decisions and get rid of the excess.
But we’ve never gotten around to it. Again, you may ask, why? Because we’re usually totally spazzing to get the decorations out of the basement and up around the house, so we can’t do it then. And in January, when we take them down, we’re just so sick of them that we put them away and swear that next year—NEXT YEAR!—will be the year we will go through all our decorations.
This year, we made the time to do just that.
Let me set the scene: it was a weekend like many others. We were determining what chores we would do because we haven’t hit the lottery yet and still have to do a lot of stuff ourselves on the weekends.
Yeah, we know how to party.
We decided that we would go through all the Christmas decorations. We were really going to do this!
Then we waited a moment to make sure that lightening didn’t strike us. Then we waited one more to make sure that hell hadn’t frozen over (and it didn’t say it had on Facebook, so we just assumed). Then we waited just one minute more to ensure that the Apocalypse wasn’t occurring.
Nope. We were good.
Some things were easy: ornaments from the first year we were married—keep.
Well, except for that ugly one that someone gave us.
My husband held it up. “This isn’t the one my mom gave us, is it?”
“Nope,” I answered. “She gave us that pretty one I already showed you. I have no idea who gave us this one.”
We both decided that it was, ahem, “not quite us,” so we passed it on to someone else who may love it much more.
Other things were easy—the lighted garland that we could never get to hang right. That was gone. Or the strange-looking elf ornament that creeped us both out. Gone too.
We were agreeing so much on the decisions of “Should it stay or should it go?” that imagine my surprise when I opened a bag that had bags of fake snow in it. I had been throwing this stuff onto decorated trees since I was a little girl.
I was about to say that I could put them in another container instead of the bag, when my husband said, “Oh good, you want to throw that out?”
Gasp…sputter…snort…
Throw that out? He might as well have told me to trash the tiny Santa that belonged to my grandmother or the Santa I made from a can and construction paper in first grade…
Or the yarn wreath with the light-up poinsettias that I made in Girl Scouts…
And just rip my heart out of my chest while he’s at it.
When I finally got these words out of my mouth, he said calmly, “Oh, that’s okay, honey. We can keep it. I just thought you wanted to get rid of it.”
This man knows that I’ve been decorating our tree with this stuff for years. He remarks how much he likes how it looks. Yet he was so agreeable to its perceived departure.
“I just want you happy,” he replied.
Oh great. He used the kicker–love.
Yes, friends. I couldn’t get angry with him because he loves me. Isn’t that what the season is all about?
Yeah, whatever—but if he wants to get rid of anything Snoopy related, he’s a dead man. Love or no love.
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s not throwing fake snow all over everything in the near vicinity, writes Wojo’s World® from Baltimore.