The day after Thanksgiving is one of my favorite days of the year because we don't go anywhere near the malls. We stay at home and put up Christmas decorations.
My mom has accumulated enough Santas to create a small militia, and finding places for them has grown challenging.
Dad steers clear of the whole thing. He is a smart man.
Friday, my brother came in my room, much like he did on Christmas mornings years ago, to wake me up and demand I help him unload our metric ton of decorations.
I thought the kid was on speed. By 8 a.m., he had packed all the autumn decorations and brought every container of Christmas items into our living room.
I glanced at the staircase and realized he had already put in place one of our favorites: the disco ball, a tacky cluster of colorful, metallic ornaments surrounded by silver garland. One of the ornaments is "missing." We think Mom broke it in an attempt to sabotage our efforts to keep it on display.
We have to hang it. It's tradition.
By the time Mom returned from work, the Santa army was in place, and the three of us discussed how to decorate the tree. She argued for red-bead garland and white lights because it was more tasteful.
Matt and I rallied for the puffy-silver garland (which matched the disco ball nicely) and colorful lights. Mom had to run errands and left with a defeated look.
We put up our first strand of colored lights, and Matt finished with the garland and ornaments.
One of our favorites hung in the front. It is a tin lid that used to be covered in some glitter design, one of my famous works of art from preschool. All the glitter has fallen off, leaving some sad, yellowing squiggles of glue. It hangs amid intricate gold ornaments and Hallmark keepsakes, but we put it up every year.
We later came across items with red and green paintings of pictures we could not identify. They served no purpose but to remind us that we were once little kids.
After this day, I realized my fondest memories were ones that were imperfect. On Thanksgiving, my cousins reminisced about the time I knocked down a brass rope stand in the middle of Marshall Field's in Chicago. We were there for breakfast before Christmas. Nowhere in the Thanksgiving conversation do I remember someone mentioning how beautiful the Marshall Field's tree was or how good the food tasted.
It was all about the imperfections.
So as I go home to bake an industrial amount of Christmas cookies; I'm reminded of the first ones we like to eat. We call them "rejects," the ones that aren't pretty enough to give to people, but they make us laugh, and they taste just as good, if not better, than the attractive ones.
Our most memorable moments, like the time my uncle ate potpourri because he thought it was candy, are precious because they remind us how unpredictable life can be.
No matter how much you plan a perfect holiday event, it won't be as memorable unless something unexpected happens. It is imperative to enjoy these unplanned parts of life.
Write to Lauren at lmphillips@bsu.edu
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