Mistletoe and Holly

The couple of days before Christmas in the Gyorfi household hit hard and ruthlessly every year. They make finals week in college seem like a walk in the park, and organizing the Inauguration party like a ride on a merry-go-round. The extreme amounts of pressure usually come from everything having to be done just the way envisioned by someone in the household (my mom or my sister), but neither one of them being home long enough or in reasonable hours to explain it to someone (my mom, sister, or me). I've got no grand visions for Christmas, generally. As long as there's an ornament hanging on some sort of vegetation, with bundles of light around in various places, I'm quite content, but not everyone has adopted my forward way of thinking.

So you might be asking why on earth am I sitting down, taking time to write an entry. The answer is that by this point, I don't value my life too highly, since I still have to make it through the day, and blog entry or no, that is not going to happen.

The first threats on my life came yesterday when I developed 200 pictures at Walmart in a little instant kiosk. You saw that correctly. 200. The only reason I didn't do the projected 230 all at once was because the program wouldn't let me.

Walmart, as anyone who lives in a suburb could say, is both a curse and a blessing. Good, because there aren't many places on earth where all in one go you can develop pictures, buy dog food, get socks, and then pick up some cereal on the way out, bad, because well, that's not necessarily the lifestyle I would like to adopt. I would not like to turn into one of those moms pushing a cart full of kids around and randomly grabbing DVDs from the $5.50 bin before going to by fake flowers to make that one lovely arrangement in the living room, and then going to buy a bike for Tommy. Noo, Walmart is, for the time being, a godsend when I need to get pictures and buy cottonballs, but I hope this convenience will only be temporary.

On a usual day, Walmart is quite busy. On December 23rd, it was pretty much a madhouse. Grown med sobbing in the toy department and old women wailing among the dry foods. It was only the kids who were treating the entire store like a state fair, and hence the adults' utter breakdown into a heaving mess. I waited in line for the kiosk for about half an hour before it was my turn. By that time, a sizable line had formed behind the customers, and I could already sense dark clouds gathering on the horizons.

I selected the 200 pictures I needed to print, and waited. The mom behind me asked if I needed to enlarge my order, since she saw that 30 of my pictures remained unprinted, and I told her no, I think I had enough to last for a while.

And then we waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

I didn't know where in the order my printing was, since even though I put my pictures in sequential order onto the memory card in the computer, they were opened up out of order in the Kodak kiosk. I sort of shifted around awkwardly on my two feet for the first 20 minutes, hoping I was invisible enough to convince the most discerning of soccer moms, while I frantically played some BubbleSmile on my phone. After that I sort of stopped shifting and then tried to look like the pictures didn't belong to me, as if I were doing a favor for some family member. Like, "I don't know WHO those people are on this picture!" And then after that, I figured I couldn't get away with that for long, and my sentiments morphed into those of abject terror as I saw the growing line of angry, irritated, Christmas-full faces beaten down into a spiritless pulp with Christmas carols and Santaland lines. These women were not joking, didn't find the situation funny, and all I could do was giggle helplessly and pray "I hope they're sending their kids to get those knives for the Christmas ham."

So after a very long, torturous 45 minutes, I was finally finished. That's when the kiosk stopped working. I decided to cut my losses, print the last 30 pictures at a different time, and high-tail it out of there.

Then my sister and I had to go buy a Christmas tree.

Christmas tree shopping is, obviously, not done in a traditional manner in my house. First of all, it's because nowadays, my mom is rarely home and doesn't have time for things like trees, or Christmas, for that matter. She is the type of woman who will stand in front of Santa Clause and say "Sorry, buddy, Christmas is coming on the 28th this year," and Santa would listen to a woman like my mother, but it's the Christmas tree sellers who screw up the grand plan. They open their Christmas tree lots the day after Thanksgiving, and nothing can make them keep the lots open after the 24th of December.

My mom is really particular about her trees. It can't be the really spiky kinds, because that's just annoying to decorate, and while it has to be dense, it also has to have appropriate amounts of spaces to hang long ornaments. It can't be too short because everyone knows you measure Christmas spirit by the height of the tree, and it can't bee too tall, because then it looks like you're trying to hard. Each branch has to leave the trunk at a 90 degree angle, with every branch having a minimum of 4 little branchings, this between a 45-30 degree angle from the main branch. The tree color has to match approximately the #006400 color swatch, and be about 63% water. All in all, it has to be the perfect tree, which is hard to find December 23rd.

But my mom remembers the one glorious year when we found THE tree, the tree that will stand about all the rest, because it embodied all these qualifications, and more! (the Nativitiy scene was basically nestled in its branches and came built-in with presents), and it was a mere $13, because they were trying desperately to get rid of their trees. They basically threw the tree at us upon entering the lot. My mom forgets that we had to drive to Van Nuys to get this tree, basically bribe the manager, and there were hardly any lots still open, but she still holds this Christmas up as THE Chrsitmas we have to aspire to again.

Since then, we decided to buy Christmas trees late. You get a bargain, and of course you can find a good-looking tree, right?

WRONG!

The Christmas trees in this lot looked like a hurricanhad gently uprooted them from their Northern California native forests and had just as gently slammed them down into the lot. The selection was sparse.

We were about to get the, literally, one sided Christmas tree, a hybrid between a slide and a douglas fir tree, when there we saw it, a shining cripple among other miserable trees. The tree that could, with a little bit of tender love and care, look like it had once been a conifer instead of a scarecrow. It also happened to have a "Sold, hold until 6" sign on it.

Since it was 5:45 PM, my sister and I decided to wait until 6 PM. At 6:03 PM, we took the tree and with a "Merry Christmas," sailed out of the lot. I felt guilty for about 5 seconds, because that one young girl with the starry eyes will now never know the joy of procrastinating Christmas tree shopping, but Christmas would be a bad season if everyone started to adopt our tradition.

So the message of this post is: Santa is not real.

And Merry Christmas.