Do you ever stop and wonder why you’re doing some of the crazy things that you’re doing? In my family, we do a lot of things that some people might consider odd, like the drumming circles at mom’s house, that always seemed to get the neighbor’s attention. But due to our oddness, I never really considered how odd some of our everyday traditions really are.
The holidays are a perfect example. There are a million crazy traditions that we will follow, although in many cases, I have no idea why we still do this stuff.
Last weekend, I woke my family up first thing in the morning, made them a nice breakfast and then forced everyone to get bundled up and go to the Christmas tree farm. (It might sound hypocritical since I keep spouting about global warming, but I figure if no one was paying to cut down the trees, then there wouldn’t be as much of a push to plant them, so I can justify it.)
I’m sure the temperature was about two degrees, with a wind chill of about negative 50 million, but I really wanted to find the perfect tree. For about an hour, we wandered through the rows of spruce and pine and fir trees, until our fingers were about to fall off. Too short, too round, bare spot, not green enough. Finally we found the perfect tree, or at least we thought it was the perfect tree, but the frost bite might have been a convincing factor.
I made my husband crouch in the snow and chop it down and by the time we had pulled the tree from the field to the car, we were pretty cold and tired, but we loaded it up and took it home and began to do all the other traditions that make the holidays absolutely insane.
First we managed to get the tree into the house, although we had neglected to realize that it was nearly too big for our house, and we were forced to trim several branches and inches just to make the tree fit in our stand. Then we began to decorate. I unwound and tested at least a dozen strands of lights and began to carefully placed them on the tree. Then we started to carefully place each and every ornament, until my husband complained he couldn’t see the branches.
It looked perfect ... until I plugged in the lights and found out that somewhere along the line, something had stopped working. I had just started examining each and every bulb when my new cat, who is just as crazy as the rest of the family, came tearing through the house, launched herself onto the tree and climbed the length, knocking at least half of the ornaments off on her way up.
With non-functional lights strewn through the house, broken ornaments covering the floor, and a mixture of sap and pine needles all over my hands, I decided to give up on the tree for a while and begin decorating the outside of the house. It was as I was balancing precariously on a metal ladder being pelted by freezing rain and wind just so I could attach lights to the top of my roof that I realized some of these traditions might be just a little strange.