Fluffing the Garland

I’m a little behind schedule this year, what with the wedding and the dog with blown knee and all, but I’m finally getting around to fluffing the garland. It’s a chore, this fluffing business, and a thankless job, but garland just doesn’t look its best without a good fluffing.

My garland has been fluffed more times than is probably good for a garland. This year sprigs have been breaking off during the process and fake pine needles are drifting like festive dandruff all over the living room. It could be this garland is being fluffed for the last time. A final fluff – the grand fluffinally. I will be a little sorry to see it go. Our seasonal swag has seen better days.

We stopped accumulating Christmas decor about the same time the kids graduated from elementary school. High school art teachers don’t dish out the same supplies as their counterparts in lower grades – popsicle sticks, cotton balls and pipe cleaners, all became a thing of the past once the kids sauntered into secondary school. The inside of the Tupperware bins that house our Christmas decorations still sparkle with a haze of red and green glitter from all those art projects – a sprinkling of yesterday and a reminder of days gone by.

These days my husband and I tend to leave decorating the house until the last possible minute. I’m not sure if we’re hoping the holidays will be suddenly canceled or if we’re just lazy. We are always reluctant to pull the ladder down from the ceiling in the garage and make our way up into the jumbled mess we tossed up there last January. It takes both of us to maneuver the boxes out of the attic – a searcher and a catcher. Neither of us fancies the job; it is neither festive nor fun. We are generally more Scrooge than Santa by the end of the ordeal. If we’re still speaking to one another after everything is retrieved we may start to trek it into the house and up to where the living room awaits its transformation. If not, the seasonal loot will wait at the base of the ladder until the next wave of enthusiasm arrives – hopefully before Santa does.

Our granddaughters enjoy a nicely decorated grandparents’ house. They like the stories about the old decorations and about the little hands that made them. There is something very entertaining about trying to imagine your parents as children. And there is something absolutely hilarious about trying to imagine your grandparents as anything but old. I feel we owe this new generation all the laughs we can can give them which is why, here in the second week of December, I’m fluffing old garland and vacuuming fake needles out of the living room carpet. It is the season after all – ready or not, fluffed or not, Christmas is almost here.