Advent Calendar ~ Day 4!

4. When do you take the tree down?

 

For the last few years it has been, conveniently, right after I go back to school, so I don’t have to put up with it. At least, that’s what they tell me. All I can say is it does indeed go down sometime between January and March. I will narrow it down to “whenever Mom gets completely sick of not being able to sew because we took down her workbench to put up the tree.”

 

My favorite part of getting rid of the trees, though, is seeing all the signs at various random city lots saying “DON’T DUMP YOUR CHRISTMAS TREE HERE, GODDAMN” which invariably have at least eight Christmas trees piled in front of them.

 

I want to know why taking the tree down isn’t as much fun as putting it up.  I mean, yeah, post-holiday letdown, but is that the only thing?


EDIT: Whoops, leftqueenlyzard's response up!  This is what I get for blogging when dead tired.

Perhaps I'll Start A Club!

HEY YOU GUYS I TOTALLY HAVE SOME BABYSITTING MONEY SO WHO WANTS TO GO HANG OUT AT THE MALL AFTER SCHOOL TOMORROW?

 

Yes. I spent the evening wrangling an extremely amiable three-year-old.  Cripes, I haven’t done that in years. I had forgotten a few things about babysitting:

 

-Other people’s houses are always kept at a temperature somewhere below freezing. I think it’s so the babysitter will be afraid to go to sleep.

-When you’ve put the kid to bed, it’s 8:30 and it feels like 4 a.m. because everything is dark and quiet and spooky.  Not to mention cold.

-At some point during the evening, you may find yourself doing something you had never, ever pictured yourself doing, such as dancing to the Garbage Truck Song.

-I don’t know about you, but I never believed them when they said “Help yourself to anything in the fridge.”*  I still don’t, and felt really guilty when I ate a chunk of their Italian dry salami.

-When you’re three and you go to bed and Mommy isn’t there, it’s the most traumatic thing ever because what if she never comes home. You had better stall the babysitter! Yeah, you’ll go to bed once you finish playing with your toys, and get one more glass of water, and read two bedtime stories, and get measured because you’re growing taller, and watch another truck DVD, and find your blankie. After that, definitely you’ll go to bed.

 

So I put him to bed and he cried about missing his mommy and I told him I’d watch for her and she was definitely coming home, I guarantee it, and then ten minutes later I put him to bed again and said no, she wasn’t there yet but by god she was coming home and she missed him too I was sure of it, and then ten minutes after that I put him to bed again and said really, she’d be there, it was okay. Then I sat around writing in a cold, spooky house till the ungodly hour of almost ten.  It was surreal. It always has been surreal, whether you were the sitter or the sittee.

 

But dude! I got me some money! And I actually am going to the mall tomorrow, but not to meet Kimmy at the arcade and then get a burger and soda—I’m going to see if I can’t get a job there. (I has a prospect!)

 

Even so, I have the strangest feeling I got TARDIS’ed at some point.  Anybody want to check?

 

 

*Except for that one time when we** got Stewart’s Peach Soda in those people’s fridge and loved it so much we chugged it all, and they always made sure to have some when we babysat after that.

 

**My brother and I did team babysitting a few times. Nobody believed he was better with kids than I was, he hated changing diapers, and I hated going alone.