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"That's the last of Christmas," my wife announced, indicating that all the Christmas decorations were put away.
"How about the upholstered wall-hanging that's over the fireplace?" I asked. "Oh," she said. "Except for that." About an hour later I handed her the stuffed reindeer that had been leaning on the stereo. No doubt, in July I'll be removing a little snowman from a corner hutch and sometime in mid-September, I'll figure out how to get the glazed Christmas Tree off of the patio window. "The last of Christmas" is a meaningless phrase, kind of like "the end of time." It never arrives. Some people want Christmas to last all year. They should come live at our house. That's not an offer. I just mean that if they did live at our house, they would know what a year-round Christmas would be like. So stop packing. It is quite possible that I will find the last Christmas decoration approximately a half-hour before Thanksgiving dinner, just before the decorations come out again. We have six crates of Christmas decorations in our garage. One of them is labeled "Easter," but that's just to throw people off. I'm not sure who, possibly the Christmas detectives, but either way it's misleading. Now there's a concept -- the Christmas detectives. Perhaps we could hire them to snoop around our house and find all the Christmas decorations we haven't put away, like the ornament that somehow ended up in the sock drawer, or the snowflake potholders. I imagine the Christmas detectives would have a dog that sniffs out the Christmas stuff, his nose lighting up like Rudolph's whenever he nears a holiday decoration. Have you ever played that game, Operation? The reason I ask is because the patient in that game has a nose that lights up whenever you fail to correctly remove an item from his body. (You never see that on E.R.) I wonder if he's related to Rudolph? Frankly, to look at them both, you'd think they'd just had a little too much eggnog. Maybe that's where the expression "he's lit," came from. Speaking of lights, I have yet to hang up Christmas lights on the house. If I did, they would never come down, and then we might as well just move to Santa's Village and be done with it. Elves would show up at our door with applications for work. Reindeer would land on the roof and scare away all the pigeons. Snowmen would call us up on the phone asking for directions and we'd have to tell them not to come over because we live in Southern California and they'd melt here! Maybe I've gotten carried away, and maybe there's a chance that, once again, I have exaggerated, but you'll be relieved to know that I've gone just as about as far as I can go with this. I'm done. I promise. No more. Not another word. Except for this one. And this one. Sorry... Christmas! Christmas! Christmas! Couldn't help it. Again, I apologize. I'm finished now. Really. Okay, I'm not, but I could have been. Now I'm through. Tell you what, I'll stop typing, and that'll be the last of this whole Christmas thing. For now. See what I'm saying? It never ends. |
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