Scott and Candy's Christmas Halfway House

Before you drop your boozed-up uncle and your toothless meth-faced co-worker off here, it's not that kind of halfway house. Back off, Corky.

This is the house where all holiday preparations are done halfway, then left to simmer, then eventually returned to.

Take our Christmas tree, for example. I have not put up a Christmas tree in 11 years. Not a regular-sized one anyway. For Scott it's been even longer with no tree. A couple of years during the "single" decade, I put up a pitiful 2 foot tree that Hankie would momentarily observe, then knock over. I didn't blame him. I couldn't respect a tree like that either. My lack of enthusiasm hung on its branches like the stench on a soggy cigar. It wasn't even Charlie Brown cute. It was just unloved. Propped up and plugged in and forgotten, like the severed head of Ted Williams in its cryogenic cubbyhole.

Being single at Christmas sucked in many ways. But at least there were no hideous in-laws to have to go see, and no rip-roaring arguments with the spouse over his gracious yuletide tradition: striving for surgical precision in the exactly matched hours we spent with his family, vs. those spent with mine.

There was also his nightmare aunt who could not stop asking me when I might be going to have a baby.

Me: "Well, first I'd have to start sleeping with him again."

All this while she and her sister prepared their special holiday hors d'oeuvres: celery with Velveeta smashed down into it with their own fingers. The only thing better than Velveeta? Velveeta with fingerprints. Lord knows what went into the cheese ball.

But I digress. Don't you hate it when people say that? I do.
Look. I digressed again.

Now I'm smack dab in the middle of the future that I'd hoped for, for many many years. My in-laws are freakishly great, my husband is so adored by my family that I could puke, and life has reached a place where I have, to a large degree, stopped gnashing my teeth in agony. I'm actually excited to do sappy traditional Christmas things. Scott bought us a pre-lit tree at Costco, and last night he got it out and assembled it and fluffed and re-fluffed the branches and plugged it in. Today he put another string of lights on it, the crystal-cut colored ones that resemble a Lite Brite.

We have reached the halfway point on the Christmas tree. Time to savor it a little before the final round. We still need to put a billion ornaments on it, but I did dig out the exquisite angel to top it off today.

Yes. She is a German Shepherd. I suppose you thought that the celestial beings with wings had human faces? Oh that's rich. God is not nearly so banal. He selects his angels' faces not from the likes of Jimmy Durante and Ernest Borgnine and whichever of the Gabors has kacked. He instead goes directly to the neglected mutts of the rural backroads. "Come, Buster!" he says. "Stop rolling in dead bird and letteth me putteth thy wings upon you!" And Buster runs up the dirt road toward that voice. He does not even stop halfway to lick his butt.