“As long as you’re stuck at home,” she suggested, giving me a wifely good-bye peck on my cheek, “why don’t you think about putting up the Christmas decorations?”
She said it with a smile and a kiss. It was more of a hint than an order, but once again, just as with the water problem in the bathroom, I knew I needed to pay attention.
Chapter 1
Lars Jenssen, who started out as my AA sponsor and ended up becoming my stepgrandfather after marrying my widowed grandmother, used to tell me, “We get too soon old and too late smart.” I like to think I wised up before it was too late. That’s why, once I finished my morning coffee and my daily roster of crossword puzzles, I got my rear in gear and set about dealing with the Christmas decorations, starting by hauling a dozen or so boxes in from the garage.
Supposedly we have a three-car garage. That’s what the real-estate agent told us. The reality is somewhat different. Once we came to Bellingham and Mel had the use of a company car, she had unloaded the Porsche I’d given her years earlier. So now one of the three bays holds my S-Class Mercedes and one holds Mel’s Police Interceptor, while the third bay is devoted solely to Christmas—Mel’s doing rather than mine.
The Christmas-only space in our garage is a direct result of Mel’s lifelong conflict with her father. She grew up as an army brat and always had a problematic relationship with her dad, who retired as a full-bird colonel. He’s gone now, and I’m more than happy to take her word for it that he wasn’t a pleasant person. For him Christmas was nothing but an annoying afterthought. Naturally Mel begs to differ.
When she divorced her first husband and moved to Seattle to go to work for SHIT, she drove cross-country towing a U-Haul trailer loaded with—you guessed it—her vast collection of Christmas decorations, which for years were stowed in a rented storage unit. After we married, whenever it came time to decorate our condo for Christmas, Mel would go to the storage facility and come traipsing home with a collection of boxes that turned our high-rise condo into a winter wonderland that the grandkids absolutely adored. The whole family loved it, yours truly included, but I couldn’t help but wonder how she did it, because each year the end result seemed to be totally different from the year before. The reality of the situation didn’t come into focus for me until after our move to Bellingham. That’s when she shut down the storage unit and transferred her amazing collection to our garage.
Mel is nothing if not organized. The boxes are loaded onto four heavy-duty rolling shelving units. The three boxes containing the pre-lit tree are pretty much self-explanatory: top, middle, and bottom, with the tree skirt neatly folded in the one labeled “Bottom.” The rest of the otherwise identical moving boxes are labeled on every visible side: “Red Balls,” “Silver Balls,” “White Balls,” “Blue Balls,” “Poinsettias, one Red and one White,” “Holly Sprigs,” “Ribbons,” “Bows,” “Angels,” “Santas,” “Nutcrackers,” “Christmas Linens,” and “Wreaths.” As I surveyed the assortment of boxes, I realized this was like one of those gigantic Lego sets my grandson, Kyle, loves so much. Everything I needed was there—some assembly required.
Since I didn’t remember seeing blue ornaments on any previous tree display, and since blue is my favorite color, I chose the box labeled “Blue Balls.” It seemed to me that white poinsettias would be a good bet with blue balls, so I took down a box of those as well as ones labeled “Angels,” “Santas,” and “Nutcrackers.” I also set aside boxes marked “Christmas Linens” and “Ribbons.” After hauling all those inside, I went to work.
Before Karen and I divorced, I remember Christmas decorating mostly as an ordeal of organized chaos. I wasn’t exactly encouraged to participate, and for good reason. Because I’m over six feet and Karen was only five-five, it was usually my job to install the angel at the top of the tree, a task that was always accomplished after the tree was fully decorated. One year, having had a bit too much holiday spirit （I believe I already mentioned I’ve been in AA for years now）， I came to grief with the ladder, and so did the tree, right along with a large number of decorations. Karen started speaking to me again sometime after New Year’s, and from then on my help with the angel was no longer required.
This year, doing the job on my own and determined not to repeat that disaster, I decided to put the angel on the top of the tree before I put the tree together. I unloaded the angels from their box, lined them up on the kitchen island, and picked out one with a blue skirt. Then, using a pair of zip-ties, I fastened that angel to the top in a fashion that I doubt even an earthquake could dislodge. Only then did I finish putting the tree together. Fortunately, all those little multicolored LED lights lit right up without the slightest hesitation.