The Insanity

My dad always said he gave my mother one free month of insanity every year.  Like clockwork every year, the mania started the day after Thanksgiving and ended on January 6th - 12th Night.  My mom is nuts over Christmas.  Seriously insane.

When I was little, we lived in a great house where the living room had a gorgeous vaulted ceiling.  My mom would find the tallest tree in the lot to soar to the top of the room.  The tallest was seventeen feet.  Seventeen feet!  It took five neighbors to help my dad get it upright in the stand.  It was breathtaking.

Then we moved to a different house.  This house had more rooms, but they were smaller in general.  Since she couldn't get one gigantic tree, my mother got two smaller trees.  One for the living room and one for the solarium.  The living room tree was fancy - all silver ornaments and bells.  The one in the solarium was covered in all the fun ornaments we had collected and made as a family through the years.  Really, the insanity in this house was rather tame.

We moved a final time just before 5th grade.  This house was enormous.  Many rooms of all different sizes.  And by the time the dishes were cleared from Thanksgiving, my mother's insanity was in full swing.  She went out and bought five six-foot artificial trees, and decorated each with it's own theme.  Then she put a small artificial tree in each of our bedrooms.  Then she brought home two real trees - one eight-footer and one ten-footer - for the living room and family room.  That's eleven trees people.  Within out first six months in the new house, my mother had filled it with eleven trees.

In the following nineteen years, the insanity has gotten worse better each year.  We are up to twenty trees crammed into the house.  Garlands abound over banisters, mantels and windows.  Not a bathroom, laundry room or hallway is left undecorated.

So now I am an "adult" in my own home.  It's not a fancy house by any means, but when the holiday season is upon me, I get this strange itch.  I yearn to plaster the walls of my house with Christmas decor.  I dig out my bins of holiday decor and start the process.  I have lit garlands over the windows of my red dining room.  Lights all over the house.  The banister is decorated.  And we get a tree.  Nothing fancy, just a six- or seven-footer for our family room.  I decorate the tree with the ornaments my parents have given me each year, and those I will give Laura in the coming years.

My mother's insanity is catching.  I am glad to have caught this particular strain of insanity.  Are we nuts?  You bet!  But it's the most wonderful time of the year.

This post was written following the Red Writing Hood prompt "Tradition."