Even as the remains of the turkey carcass are still lukewarm, Deanna and I like to kick off the holidays by engaging in our first seasonal tradition each year - fighting over the amount of Christmas decorating that is about to take place. When we first married, we had but a handful of our own Christmas-related possessions. Mine consisted of a box full of ornaments made or possessed since childhood, kept in a gift box that had been hand-decorated by an ex-girlfriend years before (a bad marital move). Hers consisted of a similarly sized box of ornaments and an alarmingly large collection of miniature Christmas books, the charm of which eludes me to this day. Our first house had a full unfinished walk-up attic, as well as a full unfinished basement, with the predictable result that we rarely worried about storage. By the time we had moved to our current house three and a half years ago, our Christmas collection had swollen to fill five or six large storage bins. Now, helped along by the unabated Christmas enthusiasm generated by the increase in our collection of miniature humans since the arrival of the twins, our Christmas possessions have grown exponentially. The weekend following Thanksgiving has become a full-fledged tactical operation as our current non-walk up attic spews bin after bin after bin of Christmas paraphernalia down into the main part of the house already packed to the gills with all manner of toys and kid-related accessories deemed necessary to raising the young 'uns. While I can't argue with the end result, the work involved in festooning every square inch of already limited space with a layer of green and red can't help but leave me a bit crabby, with the result that I have a reputation as a Christmas scrooge with Deanna. This simmering tension usually comes to a head when we are decorating the tree - while Deanna's bizarre but strictly enforced edict that ONLY round ornaments can be placed on the tree gets a pass, my efforts to keep the kids from layering on even one of our six gazillion ornaments are shouted down by all. While really this is not even a fight worth having, you can rest assured that I will have forgotten that fact by next Christmas when I stand in the attic scowling at a wall of green and red bins that will have grown again since this year.
Another treasured seasonal tradition here on CloudEight are my periodic battles with an mouse and/or mice who have sought to join our family during the holiday season as a refuge from the cold. And who can blame them - with three young and endlessly eating boys wandering the house leaving trails of tasty crumbs, the floor of every room resembles a mouse-friendly buffet. Upon the first evidence of an infiltration, I break out my arsenal, which consists of a variety of types of traps accumulated over years of battle. This includes everything from the lowly but effective glue trap to the ultimate in mouse-fighting technology - the Rat Zapper 2000. While this year's mouse (or mice??) have proved to be worthy adversaries, including routinely cleaning out traps without tripping them, studiously avoiding the Rat Zapper, and, most alarmingly, mockingly pushing one of my own springtraps from where I had set it along a baseboard to the middle of a doorway leading to the kitchen where any unwary and barefooted family member could have easily stepped on it in the morning. Brilliant! He is obviously an evil genius. He still has a ways to go to match wits with the mouse of 2002, however, who got such a superiority complex during his month long running battle with me that he used to do things like taunt us by watching us watch TV. I got that one eventually, but only after upping my game by building a temporary wall out of cardboard bricks that left him only a narrow opening between the kitchen and dining room. He tried to run the gap in the middle of one memorable night, only to find that I had created an Indiana Jones-style tunnel of terror for him. A misstep into a glue trap ended the reign of that worthy adversary. I will get this one to, as I have recently come into some good intel on his hideout. That and a troop surge out to do the trick.
Christmas is a pretty awesome time to be a parent. This holiday season, as I have the last several, I set up my dad’s old electric train set from the 1950’s for the boys. They are simply crazy about it despite its sometimes spotty functionality and my struggles to get the various electric accessories (grade crossings, switch tracks, etc.) to operate. My ability to work with aging electrical components and electrical knowledge are not what they could be. This is despite the diligent efforts of my father-in-law, who is always “teaching” me to do life-threatening electrical projects around the house, and whom I imagine is rather frustrated with my seeming inability to retain even the most basic electrical knowledge. I have stuck with it this year though, with the result that the old Iron Horse and its various accessories (even the famously uncooperative barrel-loader!) are firing on all cylinders. And when it is all working, it is pretty damn cool, and the excitement of the boys as they watch it circle the track is one of my favorite holiday things.
