So...I Saw My First One Of These...

...in a window on the way home from work this evening. I wanted to shit my depends.

I'm not going to bore your asses with how when I was a kid we didn't put the tree up until Christmas Eve, after we walked home from school in the snow and then had to shovel coal into the furnace. We know that never happened. But I'm trying to think when this phenomenon got its momentum. I remember working late one night, which in my business was about 6 PM, and I got home and walked in the door and the whole house looked like Santa's workshop. The X and her sister had gone out and gotten a tree and decorations (our first Christmas in the house) and turned the place into Peppermint Forest. I had never in my skinny assed life seen anything like it. There wasn't an area, or doorknob, or piece of wood that didn't have something on it, whether it was a bow, ribbon or garnish of some kind. I wanted to walk out and come back in and hope it was a nightmare. It wasn't. I tolerated it, begrudgingly, for a few years, until my ass got tired of taking it down every year. Yeah, that job fell in my lap. Plus, I think it had something to do with the underwear she found under the tree one year that the local waitress gave all her best customers. It was men's, not her's, that she gave as a present for all of our attentive gazing at her braless ample boobs which led to ordering one more beer than we needed and added another dollar to the tip. I would periodically stop on the way home for a pint or two to pass the time before I went home to start dinner. I just flipped them under the tree, unwrapped. They were found Christmas day after the boys opened their hundred gifts. It didn't work out well. I think we we're divorced one or two years later, but I never had to take decorations down again. And I've never had them up again in any place I've lived. The X, from what I hear, doesn't do much either. I shoulda just stripped that first time and thrown my shorts under the tree while her sister was there. Coulda saved myself alot of work.