Christmas tree down, magazine home

Okay, I refuse to take all the blame for the tree staying up until mid-January. The weekend that we were going to take it down, my husband and I both came down with a stomach bug. Believe me, I would have been fine with ordering my ten-year-old to do the job; but there are breakable ornaments up there that I've had since I bought my own first tree at the age of seventeen (two feet tall, to fit into my attic bedroom at the home for multiply disabled children in which I lived and worked, and yes, I modeled my life after Jane Eyre's). I may come across as tough and cynical in print, but I'd tear up, or at least come out with some very un-Christmaslike language, if anyone shattered one of my little glass icicles.

The problem with leaving the tree up too long, other than being mocked by friends and loved ones with no defense possible, is that you lose all that momentum from the holiday season, and every day that passes makes it that much harder to just do it, already. You're back in the rhythm of ordinary days, and you really have to push to fit a major job like undecorating and disassembling a dusty tree.

But it was getting to the point that the floor was visibly gritty, because I kept not cleaning it because I was waiting to give it a really good cleaning after the tree came down. And then, since that wasn't quite incentive enough to get me and mine off our collective duff, the new issue of the magazine went out to the printer, and sooner or later they were going to demand that I come and pick it up and take it home.

I can fit a Christmas tree into my tiny living room, as long as I don't mind not opening the curtain to our tiny balcony and my son doesn't mind sitting extra close to his tiny piano. (Okay, it's a keyboard; but it looks and acts like a piano.) And I can fit the boxes necessary for several hundred copies of SHM in my living room, as long as I keep the faith that they're going to gradually empty out and drift away, usually just in time for the hundreds of copies of the next issue to show up. But I can't have boxes and boxes of magazine and a tree. That way madness lies.

So the tree came down. It took way longer to finish the job than it should have, since I'm a complete and total control freak and I had to allot a certain number of hours to screaming at the other members of my household for not wrapping certain delicate ornaments in enough soft stuff, as well as wrapping sturdy ornaments too thoroughly.

But we got it done, and if anything got broken I won't know until next year.

So then I cleaned the horrifying floor. I did this while listening to Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) This was rather a surreal experience, since Colbert reads the book himself in his television persona and is entirely too good at it, in my opinion. I had to keep turning it off and reminding myself who had won the presidential election.

So then I had less than a day to enjoy my shiny floor, which is just as well since we don't want me going all Stepford, do we. I called the printer this morning and confirmed that the baby was safe and sound. Said printer had been alarmed a few days ago that I refused to read the galley copy all the way through before approving the job.

"I've already read this," I said to him. "The cover ads are where they should be and the center section pulls out. Run it."

"Take it home, look it over, and give me a call," he invited.

Harsh fact of life: a printer isn't going to fix a typo, unless you want to bring him a whole new file and tell him to start the job again from scratch. I wasn't going to put myself through finding some horrifying misspelling in spite of all my reading and rereading. If it was there, I didn't want to know.

"Just do it," I said now. "Print it up. If there's something wrong, it's all my fault." My deeds upon my head.

He looked dubious, which is weird since this is how I've done things since I started this mad venture. True, there was that horrifying time when the center pull-out section for kids was not, in fact, in the center of the magazine; but I caught that right in the copy shop, since it's the first thing I look for. I don't do the "take it home, look it over" thing. I come in, ask them to please print stuff, ask them to please put said stuff in boxes that are perhaps not quite so large as last time since I'm the one lugging them up the danged steps, pick up my stuff when it's ready, pay without murmuring, thank everyone in the shop (including other customers) profusely, and drive away, not to be seen again until either the next issue needs printing or I need more copies of this one. I've never once come in on some random day raving about how if only they'd let me loll around all afternoon with a galley copy of some issue or other, my life would have been different.

I don't know why the guy was going all Nellie-girl on me this time. I'd been hoping that my brisk let's-go-let's-go attitude would rub off and get me the order the very next day, especially since it's a slightly smaller order than last time; but no such luck.

But at least it's here now.

Party time.