Christmas: It’s a Pretty Tough Climb

I am a Christmas child, filled with the joy of the season--caroling, presents, tall trees sparkling with wonder. In our house, everywhere we can hang or dangle something, we do, beginning with the venerable angels I received for my 18th birthday. They are looking much perkier since Patsy made new clothes for them the year before last. They hang from the rafters in the living room.

One reason we put up everything, even if it’s tarnished or broken, is because my birthday is Christmas Eve and Patsy’s is Dec. 20. We are accustomed to having our birthdays overlooked, so we do everything we can for Christmas.

This year, with Christmas just two weeks from today, I seem to be getting off to a slow start. I was out of town last week when I should have been buying, wrapping and overdrawing.

We have more ornaments than a large department store and they are all carefully packed in tissue paper in dozens of boxes in the attic. One of us used to climb the ladder and hand the boxes down to the other who would carry them down the hall and stack them in the living room. But since the boxes have multiplied so, it takes a young man up on the ladder to get the stuff down. This year I was away when he did the job.

One of the reasons the sparkle is absent from my eye and the pep from my step is because when I came home, the living room was filled with rabbits, ducks, chickens and lambs, all made of colorful plush and velvet and in various stages of decomposition.

A young man who was here helping move stuff around the day I left for La Quinta had said he would get the Christmas boxes out. I did not make clear it was the boxes in the attic, and he brought in the Easter boxes from the closet in the carport.

All I had said, “Get all the boxes,” so it really wasn’t his fault. He must have thought we were odd to decorate for Christmas with bunnies, but, on the other hand, he was here the day a carpenter totally boarded over the crawl hole into the attic. Maybe he thought we had given up on Christmas.

That’s not all. I don’t like any of the presents I have bought. I am sure that you know people who go to the wholesale garment district and come back with enough Adolfos to dress a Nancy Reagan luncheon party. I seem to go to the wrong places. And the things that look, well, all right, in the showroom are real dogs when I get them home. I seem to have carefully chosen a hostess gown of pumpkin orange shiny material, which I think glows in the dark. It looks as if it might have been designed for wear by a young woman who knows how to say, “Hi, sailor, looking for a good time?” in seven or eight languages.

I also buy every magazine that says it will tell me how to make a real gingerbread house suitable for occupation by a family of five. These magazines also tell you how to make your own ornaments. There are itsy-bitsy wreaths, needlepointed stars “you can make in 20 minutes.” (It takes me that long to thread the needle.) There are roly-poly Santas and wreaths of jingle bells. You understand that the women who make these in an evening also have three immaculate children, work as financial consultants to a group of stock and bond houses and are finance chairwomen for their colleges’ $10-million fund drives.

I have to believe it because their pictures are right there in the magazine, wearing the designer suits they copied from a picture and made out of tablecloths.

I am sure I will be seized with the spirit of the holidays any day now. Just as soon as I can unpack. On the other hand, the yellow chicken with the straw boater and the old lavender rabbit with the pink ears look quite festive. Wrong holiday but when I think of shuttling those boxes down the hall and putting the elves on the mantel I get shooting pains in my knees.

Do you think that just this once we could leave the boxes in the attic? Oh, well, get the ladder.