This Christmas season has been off to a slow start for me. With only a mere two weeks until Santa comes, I hadn’t even begun to shop. This would normally start a panic inside my anxious brain, but the elves had taken over both hemispheres and were banging so loud I couldn’t hear the clock ticking.
But what about the frames I asked the elves when the cutting was over. THEDOLLARSTOREYOUIDIOT they answered and so me and The Big Daddy headed off for a plate of wings and a beer and then to buy a pallet of frames.
*****Side story to the story: We’re in The Dollar Store where I always buy reading glasses by the dozen. I am sitting on the floor with my file folder of printables trying to decide on gold/silver/gold silver combo/mat gold/mat silver. Ask The Big Daddy the elves say up inside my head and so I say to him, “Which of these do you like better?”
And he says, “I don’t know. How much are they?”
“They’re a dollar.”
“A DOLLAR,” he yells back.
“Yeah. We’re at the Dollar Store.”
“I know, but how much are they?”
“They’re a dollar cuz we’re at the Dollar Store.”
“You mean everything here is only a dollar? Like this candle is a dollar,” he says holding it up. “And this vase. This is a dollar? What about this mirror? I bet this isn’t a dollar.”
“Yeah, Forrest Gump, it’s all a dollar.”
“Holy shit,” he says. “I have to look around some more.”
I. kid. you. not.*****
I’m in my house on Saturday when my neighbor, Marianne, comes in. Breathless and excited because the elves have been banging in her head, too. “The tree trunks,” she says. “I know what to do with them. You drill a hole in the trunk and shove a Christmas branch in it. So cute,” she says.
And the elves up in my head that have been dormant for all of thirty minutes wake up and start running around like somebody just pulled the fire alarm.
*****Side story to the story: We’re at the hardware store buying our tree off the lot and I am chatting it up with the woman in front of me. “See these little pieces of trunk they cut off and throw in here. They make cute little candle holders. Kind of woodsy looking. And these extra branches? They throw those out. Do you know how many places you can use these?”
Marianne and her husband drive by. Her husband says, “Hey, isn’t that Kathy Fisher?” Marianne says, “No! That looks nothing like her. Why would you think that?”
Her husband says, “Not that one. The one with her head in the garbage can.”
And Marianne says, “Stop the car I have to see what she’s getting.”
We both starting rummaging through the discarded branches and trunk shavings and put some in the back of our cars. The kid working at the lot looks at us like we’re the batshit crazy hoarders that are on TLC with our roaches and maggots and smelly stuffed animals with the feces on them.*****
Hush now, Teenage Mutant Hardware Boyman with your hair paste and six-pack. We are not hoarders. We are women of a certain age You can’t shame us.
We’re brilliant.
The elves up in our heads have been telling us so for years.
Now cut some more branches off for us.
