Christmas Challenges

NOTES OF CONCERN…

   …Jack Blair

                  A Merry Christmas You Say?

The holiday season filled with good cheer, happy and pleasant people, shops filled with goodies, children brimming with happy anticipation, decorations in the towns and cities, old Christmas movies you loved from your childhood being reshown and a general atmosphere of good will is everywhere.

Well let me burst that bubble for you.

I will share what the week leading up to Christmas was like for me.

I went twice as far as usual on the coldest day to climb to the top of a mountain to pick a Christmas tree, have it cut and wrapped and bring it home.

How was I to know that people go to see these trees in the summer or fall, buy one and have it tagged and in the cold of winter just drive up with their tag, stay in their warm cars, and someone brings them their tree? How was I to know that all the really great trees I could see at the bottom of the mountain were not for sale. Who knew there was not be one Frazier fir available, our tree of choice.

I bought one and brought the tree home and put it on the porch. It stayed there for five days. Nobody told me to water it. The day we finally put it up in the house it was a good thing we had enough ornaments that people would not notice we didn’t have many needles on our tree. My wife has serious reservations that there will actually still be a tree on Christmas day.

Also the week brought a request from my wife that I paint a number of windowsills. Did you know if you take the color you want to the hardware store and they have to mix it for you it cannot be returned if on getting home you find it isn’t really a good match? So you keep buying until you get lucky.

I said to myself: how hard could painting windowsills be. Well, I hadn’t counted on one side of the sill being glass that is not to get any paint. I did not count on moving along from window to window holding the stain, a brush, a rag and how unfocused one can get in the process.

Who knew I would spill the stain, the entire can, on the floor. And that was a carpeted floor. Who knew stain works through the carpet to the wood underneath? Who should have known that is why people use drop cloths. So in addition to finishing the staining the carpet had to be cut up from the floor and the wood underneath cleaned.

Speaking of painting a painter was called in to do some ceiling work. He has worked for us a long time and is a good friend. It was a pretty minor job but it was a ceiling and he had to stand on a ladder. I should have mentioned my experience of working without a drop cloth as he spilled his paint on my favorite leather chair. Did you know paint cannot be taken off a leather chair without leaving a serious difference in color variations with the remaining leather.

It was clear by then that the week was not going very well.

Finally, I was returning home after dark, coming up Central Street and stopping across from my driveway while cars driving in the other direction were whizzing past me. I saw an opening, took a hard left into the driveway and SMASH. My wife had visitors who had never been to our home and were unfamiliar with the parking places. So they parked their car at the end of the driveway and I drove right into it. Head on. Another wonderful thing about the holiday season is I couldn’t schedule bodywork before January 7^th.

If you don’t see much of me between now and December 25^th it is probably because I am afraid to leave the house, afraid to do anything in the house, don’t have my favorite chair from which to watch television, and my car needs a facelift.

I am finding it a little difficult to utter the expected “Ho Ho Ho” of the season. I am hoping that I have received my share of surprises from Mr. Claus this year and that he will skip my house until 2015.