Decorating - no matter how poorly - part of Christmas memories

Why is it that decorating for Christmas has to be so complicated?

At our house this year, it involved two gallons of paint and seven boxes of new Christmas lights.

I will admit our living room looks nicer than it did. Still, I never remember painting the living room as one of those cherished holiday moments from my childhood.

Yep, there's nothing quite like the smell of paint fumes and pine mixed together.

If you combine that with a little spiked eggnog, I have a feeling you'll end up with the most unique Christmas decorations around.

We got a real Christmas tree this year, as we've been doing since 1996, the year our daughter was born.

My wife insists on getting a "live" tree, though I think it ceases to be living the moment some worker in the mountains of North Carolina takes a chain saw to it.

I know an artificial tree would be less complicated. Never has "some assembly required" been so easy. All you have to do is match colors, and even as inept as I am at putting things together, I can figure that one out.

But heck, why should ease of use factor into our decorating plans.

I will admit we got a nice tree this year. It's a lot fatter than the ones we've had recently. Or should I say it's big-boned.

Either way, we had to move some furniture around in our living room to get the thing to fit in front of our window, thus eliminating one half of the room and our path to our breakfast area.

I've cheated a couple of times, squeezing myself between pine needles and furniture. But, it's hard to hide my transgression. The needles on the carpet are a dead giveaway that I was too lazy to walk the extra 10 feet to the other side of the room.

I've tried blaming the cat. It hasn't worked.

Just one year I wish I would plug in my lights from the previous year and have all of them work.

This year, our outdoor lights wouldn't come on. And on top of that, our lit snowman is missing his head because we can't figure out why those lights won't work.

I'm hoping it warms up enough so Frosty will just melt away and we can get rid of him. Right now, we don't have so much a snowman in the front yard as two lit squares on top of each other.

Our lights on our Christmas tree that normally blink aren't blinking.

I know. Most people probably don't like blinking lights. However, the angel on the top of our tree won't stop blinking, so we try to balance it out.

It's the first angel my wife and I purchased when we got married in 1989. It started blinking right away, and we've never managed to figure out how to get it to stop.

We hate to get a new one. After all, it was our first.

We just go with it and make some of our lights on the tree blink, but we can't get them to do that this year.

So, we've got a blinking angel that we don't want to blink and lights that we want to blink that don't.

What a blinking disaster. 

But you know what? That is what Christmas is all about.

I don't remember what my wife bought me for a Christmas present in 1989. But, I know we got that angel, and I know we've never figured out why it blinks.

These are the memories that make for good holidays.

Ken Buday is the editor of the Havelock News.