My house husband (he’s like a house elf except taller) is either bored out of his mind being home all day or really super excited about Christmas. Just a second while I check the calendar . It is still November, isn’t it?
Never EVER have we had our outside lights up, our Christmas tree decorated, and our cards on the table ready to be signed, sealed and sent before the middle of December. Until now. Every day some new Christmas thing magically appears on a doorknob or a shelf or a table or some random wall space. Things I’ve had packed away and forgotten about are surfacing everywhere. It’s a little scary.
For instance, there’s this card that I brought home from Scotland in 2007. Because that’s what people do when they travel to Scotland – they buy Christmas cards and bring them home across the ocean. I did that, so it must be true.
There was a box of different designs by Thomas Joseph and somehow I missed sending this one out to anyone. So now it’s a keepsake. It was in a rather large box filled with a random assortment of unsent cards from years gone by which W is strongly suggesting I use up before purchasing more. (Too late, but he doesn’t need to know that right now.) And he also may have mentioned the many rolls of unused Christmas wrapping paper in the store-room. As well as the fact that the whole house is full of an insane amount of shit.
So on the one hand he’s telling me to get rid of all this crap, and on the other he’s wondering whatever happened to that plastic ice holder thingy that used to be in the freezer because he’d like to put ice in it. The more I think about it and search for it, the more convinced I am becoming that I probably threw it out last summer. I went through a crazy stage in my life where I was making a supreme effort to get rid of a bunch of the shit that our house is so full of. And see what happens when I try that. So I’m not doing it again without supervision.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not in any way being critical or trying to discourage whatever the hell he’s up to around here. Even though some of my cupboards have been rearranged and he hangs things up that should go in the dryer and vice versa and he threw out my half glass of wine that had been sitting on the counter for about 48 hours. Maybe I was letting it breathe. He could have asked.
Nope, I’m actually thrilled that I didn’t have to wrestle with the stupid tree this year or figure out where to hang that snowman with the dangly legs which end in giant jingle bells. When W goes to bring in the paper tomorrow morning with that thing hanging on the doorknob, whatever happens next will not be my fault.
I think it’s excellent that he discovered we already had parmesan cheese out of sight in the back of the fridge, but his timing was off and he should have let me know that before I came home with more. He’s been doing most of the grocery shopping and apparently I just mess up his system, so perhaps I should gracefully hand that responsibility over to him in its entirety. I’ve done it for forty years, the next forty can be his.
I can’t get out of the Christmas card writing though. If he did the cards with his House Elf handwriting most people wouldn’t have a clue who sent them. Sometimes he can’t even read what he’s written himself. So I’ll let him off the hook for that Christmas chore. And I’ll probably still cook the turkey.
But everything else – wow – he’s doing a bang up job. I will try to stay happy cheering from the sidelines. For the next thirty days. It’s gonna be a long Christmas.
Breathing Space 
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