The Rules of Christmas, Part 2

How the Decorating Process works:

I’m a stage setter. That means smells and bells. I.e. Christmas isn’t legit unless there’s Christmas “in the air.”

That starts with seasonal candles.
You know, the really good sort–the cinnamon and vanilla and maple-y ones.
Half an hour in, the living room is a fog of delicious foodie smells.

This makes it difficult to do anything but sip hot chocolate.
Or guzzle eggnog.
Or pull apart soft strips of freshly baked cinnamon rolls.
But the Cunninghams are courageous types who eventually summon the will power to move past the food…

What follows next is a drunk-on-sugar oblivion that results in sloppy, lovey dancing as we crank the carols.

I swoop around the room doing dips and revolutions with the 19 month old emperor Justus. He participates with the same verbal gusto of someone riding a rollercoaster–yipping and giggling with each slope and turn.

In the end, he spends more time grinning and bop-bopping from side to side to the music than he does decorating. I think if it was up to him, we’d trash the tree and invite the neighbors in for a Christmas ball.

Then it’s time to hone in on the tree. Oh yeah, the tree.

You know how in some houses, some dads always carve the turkeys?
In our house, dads (named Chuck) do the wrap around lighting.
It’s like Christmas chivalry–a knightly duty to joust the prickly evergreen branches into submission.

Then comes the Christmas bulbs.
They are mostly orange, gold and silver.
And lean a little too fancy for our very lived-in lives.

We’re trying to dumb our tree down with the tacky Christmas ornaments you’d expect to see in A Christmas Story or some other nostalgic 1950s-set flick. We have a good headstart in the ornaments below, in my humble opinion, but we still have a long way to go.

Justus has bouts of serious decorating. He carefully studies the aerodynamics of various “balls”, for example. Which inevitably results in shiny glass casualties.

He also keeps returning, puzzled, to the basketball hoop ornament whose tiny hoop is oddly small for an ornament to be shot into (this does not stop him from repeatedly trying.)

We do not put out a lot of holiday knick knacks. Never been a knick knack girl.

There are only two Sarah-Cunningham-approved-knick-knacks (shown below). I think the one guy really makes out because he gets to stand by a palm tree all day.

After this is all done, we turn off the lights and look at the sparkly Christmas reflections on the ceiling before hunkering down in the bed and watching Christmas specials. It’s amazing to me how many of the ones on On Demand involve a mouse narrator and the poem A Night Before Christmas.

I’m starting a petition that they hand off the narrator post to a different animal in future holiday specials. Maybe a nice gangster Christmas dove (sorta reminiscent of the Good Feather pigeons on Animaniacs) or some shaggy sheep that wandered away from the stables.

I’ve got ideas, people. It doesn’t always have to be mice.

Welcome to my Christmas craziness. What about you? What does your Christmas look like?