The World According To Anne Arky

This might not scare some people, but it absolutely terrifies me. There are plans to be made, gifts to be bought, cards to be bought, addressed and mailed! A party to be planned! Trees to be trimmed! Yes, that’s treeS, as in more than one. Every year I try to plan early and get things done so I am not sitting in my living room three days after Christmas addressing cards, wrapping presents and still decorating trees. Yes, really! Mind you, the main tree (the big one that rotates) gets decorated last (ideally) at my annual tree-decorating party. Several years ago I thought about having “a couple” of theme trees because I have enough decorations to decorate a third-world country, but one theme led to another and another, and now I could probably have my own tree show and charge admission.

Last Christmas was the first time I’d been able to do any theme trees, and I not only didn’t get all of them done – I decorated three of them after Christmas and still didn’t get all of them done. I got all but one finished. I have higher hopes for this year. I need to try to find some new trees – bigger than my small ones and smaller than my big ones – all artificial, of course. I envision asking some poor, harried sales person for five in-between trees. “In between WHAT?!” he says. I wonder how many languages have their own equivalent of “Bah! Humbug!”? Or into how many languages it can be translated?

I will probably start putting up my theme trees at Thanksgiving this year. That way, I might stand a better chance at getting them all up before Valentine’s Day. At last count, there were five of them – the music tree, the Santa tree, the places tree (ornaments from places I have lived or loved very much – NOT just random ornaments from places I have traveled) [considering how little I have actually traveled, this would be a very skimpily-clad tree], the “It’s A Wonderful Life” tree and the hobbies tree. There is also a small flat-backed tree that is the jewelry tree, but it didn’t start out to be a theme tree so much as a “what the heck am I going to do with all this Christmas jewelry that I never wear any more but can’t bear to throw away?” tree. I have considered having a postcard tree, which I have seen done, and I certainly have enough Christmas postcards to support it (they are the single-largest topic of cards that I have), but postcards are already represented on my hobbies tree (as are baseball, Monopoly and every other thing you can think of), so I’m only rather half-heartedly considering it. I have another tree idea for the front porch that doesn’t involve anything but weather-proof ribbons, but I have never been ambitious enough to carry this one to its fruition. Maybe this year. (That's what I said about the Braves winning another World Series, too. Oh, well.)

A friend of mine once told me that he gets deeply depressed at Christmas because of a lot of unpleasantly-spent holidays his family had when he was growing up, and seeing all the decorations all around makes him very sad. I instructed him not to set foot within ten feet of my house during the holidays, because if Christmas depresses him, he'd be positively suicidal after coming to my house.

Christmas cards present their own brand of merry hell. A full two years before I began actively collecting postcards, I started sending Christmas postcards instead of cards with envelopes because of their cost effectiveness. When your Christmas card list outnumbers the dishonest politicians in the world, you have to do something to cut costs, and postage for postcards is cheaper than regular first-class. When I first started this tradition, the difference was negligible, but the cost of postage was comparably negligible, too. Now the difference is greater than the whole stamp used to be, so at 15¢ apiece, I save an average of $15 a year on postage alone. That will buy half a Christmas present, or three whole ones, depending on who you are buying for. I’m surprised the cost alone doesn’t create more of a market for them, but gradually, over the past 15 years or so, the market for Christmas postcards has all but disappeared, and with it, Christmas postcards themselves. Fifteen years ago, my quest was to find more Victorian-style Christmas postcards like the ones I had been sending for quite a few years at the time. Ten years ago, the objective was to find some Christmas postcards that weren’t icky-cutesy or overly religious. A few years later, I was endeavoring to find postcards at all. In 2001, after Nine-Eleven and the subsequent anthrax scares, there was a one-time-good-deal-only run on Christmas postcards, and they were remarkably patriotic, but since then, they are nigh onto impossible to find. I sometimes start looking for them around March. I suppose I could make my own, but I haven’t been very lucky with that endeavor so far, so I’m not counting on it as a future solution.

Why, you might ask, would any single individual be sending out upwards of 100 Christmas cards? Well, I can’t speak for any other individual, but this one is a keep-in-toucher, and I maintain close-to-loose contact with most of the people I’ve called “friends” in my life. My sister swears I’ve exchanged birthday cards with everybody I’ve ever passed in traffic, and maintains that the same must be true for Christmas cards. Not so. Just most of them. People do actually get deleted from my list from time to time, without having to die first. Every so often I go through my list and try to determine the last time I have heard from this or that person, and if it’s longer ago than, say, five years, I might put them on the Disinterested List, where they might stay for a couple of years before I consign them to the Probably Dead List. I have a few friends who give you one year to appeal your fate, and if you don’t send them a Christmas card, they place you permanently on the I’m Never Sending That Ingrate Another Christmas Card As Long As I Live List, never to be redeemed even if you send them Christmas cards from now on.

Some people I know recycle their Christmas cards either as colorful gift tags in future years or just into a random recycling system. Not me. (I’m sure you expected that.) Mine get all rounded up after the holidays and placed into the Current Year Letters box.

I have never been much on outdoor decorations other than a wreath over a door here and there, but now that I have a house, I suppose I should make it as festive outside as it is inside. One of my friends who has such a passion for outdoor decorating that his house made the Atlanta “Tacky Lights” tour three years in a row thought that my having a house meant that I should now decorate outdoors. To that end, last year he gave me one of those two-dimensional (shaped, but hollow) bobbing-head deer that lights up. I had neither the time nor the energy and patience to assemble it last year, and I told him I would need his help with it, so maybe this year I will have a deer grazing in my front yard. I only hope it doesn’t inspire him to contribute a whole menagerie of outdoor Christmas tackery, because I think garlands and ribbons on the back of the house, a well-placed wreath or two and a grazing deer are enough. If you want festive, you have to come over and come in the house to find it.

Only 114 days until Christmas. Yeehaw!