Channeling My Mother

Porkchop wanted me to title this post "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas," but I think that's too obvious (sorry, P-chop!).

As Suzi and I were browsing greenery last night, I told her about how I keep seeing these tall, often wire, conical tree-shaped decorations everywhere and how I secretly want some (not so secretly now). Tree-shaped decorations, greenery, an urge to buy a poinsettia...I am channeling my mother.

My mom usually isn't one of those knick-knacky people with tons of useless crap cluttering every available space in the house. I grew up with minimalism, which I really appreciate. But come Christmas, my mom, in her advanced years, has taken to bringing out the crap. Okay, so maybe I was used to having 2-3 Christmas trees in our house growing up (one of which was a plastic cactus....don't ask), but she has taken recent holiday decorating to new heights.

When we go to their house in December now, there are at least 2 dozen Santa Clauses displayed on their stairs, the fireplace mantel, windowsills...anywhere you can put a Santa Claus, there is one.

It's crazy.

This year, in honor of the Western-themed Christmas tree (not to be confused with the vacation-souvenir-decorated aluminum tree), my mom brought out their John Wayne stand-up cut-out. Holding a rifle and wearing a bandanna, John Wayne protects the precious "turquoise"-garlanded tree under the eyes of the cowboy Santa Clauses perched in the windowsill. It is a sight to behold.

But back to our apartment.

In my opinion, the mantel in our living room is quite tastefully done with evergreen cuttings, pinecones, and a pretty little pre-made centerpiece with different types of cuttings and little blue berry things.

Our tree, on the other hand, looks like a bad acid trip (or what I imagine a bad acid trip would be). Don't get my wrong, I love it! It's delightfully gaudy with crazy shiny electric-colored decorations. It's a nice break from our usually sedate rainbow-lit tree with simple red, silver, and white ball ornaments. With our current tree, my eyes can't focus, it's a blur of glitter and bright Mardi Gras colors. I will post pictures later.

Also in a break with tradition, we decided to bring all of our snow globes out from storage and set them on top of the entertainment unit (which is also adorned with greenery). Porkchop and I used to enjoy buying and asking friends to buy snowglobes from different cities (the saddest: NYC with the World Trade Center), so we have quite a few. Additionally, my mom sends us a Sonic snow globe each year, which always registers high on the tacky meter.

So, all in all, our living room looks a bit tackalicious. And, it's great!

On Another Subject
Earlier, I was reading an article on the Post-Dispatch website. When asked about the current outages, one of the Ameren VPs said, "blah blah blah...Ice storms are crazy." What?! That sounds like something I would say! If my power has been out for 4 days (as it was this summer), I want to hear serious, official, jargon-loaded explanations, not "Ice storms are crazy." No shit!