The Revenge of Three-Legged Rudolph

This is a reworked version of a column that first appeared in The Post-Crescent (Appleton/Fox Cities, Wisconsin) on Dec. 14, 2008. The original is here.

For good reason, I’ve always been conflicted about Christmas.

This delightful version
of Rudolph-as-ornament
is for sale on Amazon.

My first memory of anything is this: Laying on my parents’ bed. Getting my diaper changed. Holding a Christmas tree ornament. Ceramic, I think.

It was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I know this for sure.

And — because this is what babies do — I put Rudolph in my mouth, bit down, and … separated one of his cute little glass-like legs from his cute little glass-like body.

Yes, the first actual thing I EVER did was create a horribly disfigured model of a make-believe and magical mammal that many children believe to be on the right-hand of SANTA FREAKING CLAUSE, and who lives with other make-believe lifeforms ON THE TOP OF THE FREAKING WORLD.

My mom hung this mutant, manufactured mistake from our Christmas tree for two decades.

I mentioned this first memory to my mom a couple weeks ago. She’s 95.

“So, you’re the one who did that?” she said.

I am. And I don’t condone such literal infantile behavior, but I never felt too bad about this.

Rudolph still exists in his one-limb-missing form, in my late sister’s home in Rhinelander, and has decorated her family’s trees since the mid 1970s.

Maybe he'll make his way back to me someday, and we’ll place him on a worthy branch of our fake Spruce. Or maybe it’s a fake Frasier fur. I have no clue, except that it’s fake.

Your tree probably isn’t.

Most of us know some historical background about the practice of plucking a perfectly fine, healthy, gorgeous evergreen from its natural setting on Mother Earth and placing it INSIDE YOUR HOUSE next to a La-Z-Boy recliner and a flat-panel TV for a month or so.

It's just an odd thing to do.

a)      You drive into a perfectly good stand of coniferous forest,

b)      You hunt down the healthiest example of modern forestry you can find

c)   Your spouse and kids get excited about something they’d never EVER otherwise get excited about and then

d)      YOU KILL THE DAMNED THING, strap it to the roof of the SUV or (for the environmentally conscious) Prius, and bring it home only to

e)      Drape the most unnatural looking stuff ever from top to bottom and

f)       Tell yourself how beautiful it is in this absolutely wrong setting.
So, just maybe it's my non-joyous Yule-attitude that has given my Reason For Living (RFL) and I so many disturbing memories of Christmas trees gone wrong.

Bad Christmas karma.

A few years ago, in a different Flannery house, this prospect became apparent to us.

She had just finished ornamentalizing the Flan's Christmas tree, and invited me downstairs to bask in the yuletide LED glow.

If you know me, you know this: I rarely turn down invitations to bask.

I poured two glasses of Bailey's Irish Cream on the rocks, headed to the family room, turned off the TV and parked myself in a cushy recliner, next to RFL’s equally cushy couch.

There we sat, having grown-up conversation, admiring her handiwork and well, basking away.

After 10 minutes of this civilized behavior, the phone rang. It was RFL’s brother, and while they chatted, I stretched out even further on the recliner.

Soon, my eyelids were colliding, in a race to see if they could render me semiconscious while RFL was still on the phone.

RFL and her brother kept talking, like they’d never talked before. This took its toll on me.

Just before I drifted off, I was thinking about how good it feels to fall asleep at a moment's notice.

I was incredibly happy, if not a little pathetic.

And then I woke up, which will happen when your spouse screams from two feet away.

"OHJESUSCHRISTTHETREEISFALLING!"

My eyelids were doing their best to keep me from acting on this clear and present danger, but RFL issued more household disaster warnings every millisecond or so.

"JESUSCHRISTWATCHOUTITMIGHTFALLONYOU!"

"OHGODDAMMIT!"

"OHCRAP!"

If we were making a movie about our lives, this scene might last four or five minutes.

But it really took about three seconds for the tree to lurch toward me, lose about 90 percent of its ornaments, bundle the lights together, spill the water in the stand, drop hundreds of needles and turn a perfectly good night at home into a holiday-season nightmare.

I can't lie. Bad words were said. Words that best not bespoil these precious and formerly holy walls.

I'm sure that those words expressed emotions that, over the next four years, will fade away into abject terror during the next presidency.

I'm sure we didn't really mean those things, bellowed in the season of giving and gratitude.

We have much reason to be thankful. For sure. But in that sloppy and panicked moment, we weren't having much to do with that.

About 30 minutes after the tree hurtled itself to the berber, we were swilling another round of Bailey’s. And we both came to the same conclusion.

"Maybe we should have paid more attention to what you said before we sat down," I said.

"Yep," RFL said. "I knew it."

Here's what she said, before we sat down, before eyes were closed, before Bailey's was swilled, phones were rung and needles were spilled:

"Look at the tree. Does it look like it's tilting to you? Doesn't it look like it's heading in this direction?"

And here's what I said: "Nah. The stand will keep it up."

So, you know what I mean.

A lifetime in the making, this was The Revenge of Three-Legged Rudolph.

Ho. Ho. Ho.