Post-holiday humor

Undecorating the House

Don’t let Elf On The Shelf take a shit in your Easter basket

Put out an APB on this slippery little bastard on Jan 2nd. Photo by Louise Smith on Unsplash

Who’s up for some holiday undecorating today? If you think that your fucking Elf on the Shelf needs an introduction to the Easter Bunny, I hope someone takes out that little fucker with a firecracker on the Fourth of July. If that doesn’t off that little bastard, I hope your house gets egged on Halloween. And that also applies to Christmas decorations up before Halloween, or worse, before Costco’s. Realizing different traditions govern the end of the holiday season, I give you a pass until Valentine’s Day, but after that, my Cupid’s arrow is going to deflate your inflatable lawn Abominable.

I take down my holiday decorations on Jan 1, since the New Year’s holiday is all about NYE. After that, it’s just bowl games and houseguests who have overstayed their welcome. Yes, I’m looking at you, Aunt Pamela.

I look forward to the less cluttered aesthetic moment that comes to a house once a year when the holiday decorations come down. Outside of that, you’re going to need to Marie Kondo it.

Each year, I cringe at my holiday decorating results and then impulse-buy a supersize ornament assortment from Walmart — by which time their selection has been picked over. My tree, now covered with Walmart rejects, descends from bad to abysmal.

What I am dreaming of is a FrontGate Christmas, not the yield of a desperate discount store spree after the shelves have been ransacked on Black Friday. I’ll vow to hit the FrontGate clearance sales to get some decent decor for next year. Really, Frontgate $200 for a fucking pillow cover that I will use for a month? I would have to sell a kidney to deck my tree with your fucking frippery.

But when that post-holiday undecorating actually happens, I realize I lack storage for what I already have. So I place the most offensive ornaments — a very low bar — in the Goodwill pile. I then remove the most fragile but cherished ornaments that I double-hooked to play interference against my two feline thugs. Unfortunately, they invariably slip through my fingers and scatter fragments to be unearthed by the piggy who went to market in June. And so, I achieve ornament parity with the previous year.

We sold an oversized artificial Christmas tree to avoid moving and storing it when we downsized into our house. By a supermajority of myself, the dog, and two cats, we overruled my husband’s tree veto the following year. Our attic access is sized large enough to accommodate an oversized suitcase, but not the box from an oversized Christmas tree poised atop my head as I compress my cervical spine ascending a rickety wooden ladder. After that fail and not yet paralyzed, I decide to take the tree sections up there disassembled, including the box.

Except that your typical artificial Christmas tree is packed into its box so tightly that the release of energy from breaking the seal with an X-Acto knife could level your house. This genie is never going back in the bottle, nor is this tree section any smaller in cross-sectional dimension than it had been in the box. But it is lighter.

I sustained a corneal abrasion after one of the artificial branches recoiled as I yanked it past the access door hinges. But an eye patch for a few months and loss of peripheral vision was a small price to pay for holiday cheer.

With the tree safely tucked away in the attic, I turned my attention to the piles of sorted ornaments. And what the fuck do I do with all of these? Damn. I hadn’t bought extra ornament storage bins when they finally went on clearance last summer. But somehow, every year I do manage to get it all back in the boxes. It’s a test of will reminiscent of Tetris, but in 3-D and without the dopamine hit.

The animal hair left on the tree skirt after the season always makes me worry about which one of them needs the vet. I Google symptoms of feline syphilis. The pets look and act perfectly healthy, none with obvious bald spots. Still, the tree skirt resembles my parents’ 70s shag rug. The skirt had been satin in November. Some of the fur does not match my pets — at least I think it’s fur. No one in the house, human or otherwise, has hair that color.

But the biggest slap in the face after the holidays comes in the form of the dastardly stray decoration. The ornaments were snuggled all snug in their boxes until said stray décor leaps out and mocks us. You know that decoration that has become part of the scenery that you walk past a million times, when one morning after that second cup of espresso you see it. The fucking Elf on the Shelf.

And now you have to go up into that hellscape of an attic, which has turned into a 120-degree furnace because it is July, and find a place to put that fucker. And you’ll be up there sweating buckets while you find a space for it, opening and closing boxes and rearranging things neatly back into boxes that turn out not to have enough space in them.

Throw him away. Walmart will be back with more of that mistletoe motherfucker next year. And on sale for $34.95.

Why not head over to AFP’s Doctor Funny Friends and see what writers like Valley Girl have to say:

[embed]Mandatory, Unskippable HR Video Adult Equivalent of “No Leaving the Table Until You Finish Your… I’m gonna need you to lick that plate clean…medium.com