Adventures of the Singing Christmas Tree

Though I know perfectly well that it’s supposed to be the thought behind the gift, not the gift itself, I still wonder what happens if the person who bought the gift for you was obviously not thinking. This came up when my family and I went to my grandpa’s house for Thanksgiving, like we do every year. One of the first things we noticed was how much worthless crap he had accumulated over the past year (mostly from garage sales and thrift stores). He’s positively addicted to these places, and always finds “great deals” that he just can’t pass up, so he buys it all. For instance, when I went into the closet where my late grandma kept her art supplies, to see if I could keep myself amused for a while, there were no art supplies to be seen, but instead, stacks upon stacks of identical, ugly, old, worn-out, moth-eaten sweaters! These all turned out to be thrift shop “finds,” along with uncountable masses of other junk in his house (like the approximate 500 beat-up, stinky, dirty baseball caps).

Well, I’ve gotten off the point. Anyway, its our tradition to exchange Christmas gifts on the day we (finally) leave our grandpa’s house. We had gotten grandpa a very nice, big box of See’s Chocolates and a good pocketknife, so we gave these to him. He then produced a not-even-wrapped Singing Christmas Tree! If you’ve seen these, you know what I mean; if not, just imagine an electronic Sonny (yes, when he is dead) scratchily-singing an extremely bad Christmas song while a plastic tree which bears a frightening resemblance to a badly-rendered Furby, opens and closes its mouth and eyes (aka: piece of red felt and plastic marbles) until it breaks, which, fortunately, doesn’t take long. So, Bridget and I looked from the Thing to him and back to the Thing in utmost horror, remembering not only what Things are like, but also the terrors of Mrs. W, our fourth grade recorder teacher, who owned an identical Thing! There is no doubt in my mind that Mrs. W had some kind of horrible mental disorder, as she would, among other things terrible to fourth-graders, hold out her scarred-up hand, which had been operated on many times, and make us look at it. As I remember, it was a disgusting, purple-welted thing with five fat, stubby fingers sticking out of it at odd angles. She would also tell us about the many times she had almost died from diabetic attacks, how playing the Suzuki violin made her son go insane, and, on one occasion, proclaimed that anyone who couldn’t play a B-flat on the recorder was retarded. So, I stood, looking terror-stricken, as my grandpa held the Thing out to us. “Don’t you like it?” he asked. I wanted to say, “God, Grandpa, I wouldn’t have liked something as stupid and annoying as that when I four!” but instead I put on an extremely phony smile and croaked out something about how cute it was.

The next day, as we got into our car, I noticed the Thing on top of our suitcases, and it finally hit me that we would have to take it. With that realized, I began to think about the best way to get rid it of it, which, of course, ended up being giving it to someone I really despise. I have quite a list of these people, and I now wonder who the lucky one will be…

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