In this moment of societal collapse, it is time to put up the Christmas decorations*
On Good Morning America, right now, as I sit at the dining room table and look across the room at the television, there’s a man and woman, I don’t know their names but the guy has one of those faces where your first thought is, “I gotta remember to listen to The Beverly Hills Plastic Surgery Podcast," which, by the way, is a real podcast and if you drive down Santa Monica Boulevard there’s even a billboard for it that fills me with a kind of civic pride I don’t know how to explain, and the man and woman are selling a pre-lit, ice-blue artificial tree for about 60 bucks. There’s a QR code at the bottom of the screen. You can just have that tree right now by pointing your phone at the TV. Oh, wait, now they’re selling more trees. It’s a whole thing with selling you trees today on GMA.
Back in 1994, my friend Beth found two vintage silver tinsel trees at a garage sale. One was three feet tall and cost her 50 cents. One was six feet tall and cost a dollar. This happened in the before times of the pre-internet 90s when people were just giving those things away. Now they’re $200 and more than $200 and sometimes $1200 on eBay depending on the size and maker and condition and greediness of the seller. Anyway, Beth used her employer’s FedEx account to ship the little one to me in Fort Worth. (“I stole it just for you!”)
At the time, my mother was the on-site manager of a huge apartment complex in suburban Dallas. When people skipped out on their leases and left behind all their stuff, it was her job to go in, clear it out, and toss it in the dumpster. There were lots and lots of extremely banged up Christmas ornaments. She’d save them and I scavenged the fun ones. For my purposes the fun ones were the most scraped, chipped, age-spotted, paint-flaked and degraded. That’s like finding the old person with the most wrinkles on their face, the clear winner.
Most of our Christmas decorations, and there is an entire hall closet full of them, floor to ceiling, boxed and labeled, are going up in the next couple of weeks because it’s Alonso Duralde’s busy work season, starting right now, so up they go to avoid stress later. He has a new book about Christmas movies to sell and he’s got book events all over the place, sometimes in other states, and what feels like an infinite number of Christmas-themed podcasts to go on where he will pass judgment on Die Hard, again, because no one can come up with original interview questions. Do better, all of you.
Alonso is forever enthusiastic about Christmas and its adjacent cozy activities. The Sirius holiday music channel just launched and he’s happy about that. He just left the apartment for a press screening at Netflix and I don't even have to guess what he's listening to. I’m home thinking about Thanksgiving pie dilemmas and bills and producing all the Linoleum Knife-branded podcasts and writing this.
On top of that, it's just impossible to look at the U.S. right now and feel good. One must compartmentalize to function. So I function, as at the moment my life does not allow time for emotions regarding this holiday. And because I'm so very good at compartmentalizing, by the time Brandy and Monica pop out of the Ocean Spray cranberry juice float at the Macy’s parade,** I’ll more or less have my mind right. I have that specific task written down in the At-A-Glance. That was not a joke, by the way. I have an At-A-Glance and it's full.
*A photo of an actual decorative holiday item that we own. I can't remember where I found it, but we decided never to take it out of its bag and just hang it on the tree that way, and that is the correct choice.
**This is not happening as far as I know, but I have a lot of advice for the Macy's parade regarding the marriage of corporate floats and pop stars. My fantasy league pairings would be highly agreeable for all of us.
