The Write Mommy For The Job

by Jennifer Brown

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Tacky

I uncovered a deep dark secret while schlepping boxes of Christmas decorations up the stairs this weekend. A shocking revelation, really.

I have bad taste.

Okay, for people who know me well, this may not be a huge shock. They’ve seen me in my prized sunglasses that I scored for one penny – yes, one penny! – at Claire’s last summer. Sure I have to squint one eye and look at everything from a 73 degree angle in order to see past the giant gouge on the left lens. Still…one penny!

And they’ve seen me dragging around in the world’s dirtiest tennis shoes, mainly because I can’t justify spending more money on a pair of tennis shoes than on my car insurance.

And those who have had the pleasure of seeing me on a regular basis know that I own exactly six shirts, all of them so old the stores where they were purchased don’t exist anymore (which doesn’t really matter since they’re so faded you can’t make out the store name anyway).

Trends don’t reach me until they find their way on the sales racks and really, who needs to update their home décor anyway? Matching plates? You’re kidding me! Curtains? Can I get them for less than ten dollars? And who says you can’t count colored toilet paper and last year’s Best and Worst Dressed issue of People Magazine as decoration in the bathroom?

When it comes to buying anything that might be deemed as relating to style, I have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the outlet mall where I’ll zero in on the closest sales rack and pick out something, anything that will satisfy the immediate need.

If I buy two lamps and a pack of socks over the course of seven years, I consider myself a big splurger and secretly chastise myself for being so reckless with my money. 

But when it comes to buying Christmas paraphernalia…

If it’s shiny, cheap, and gaudy, I’ll buy it.

I begin about two weeks before Thanksgiving, breaking down to buy that unforgivably expensive $1.25 Sunday newspaper and begin analyzing the sale ads as if I’d just purchased a map to the Holy Grail.

For weeks I’ll hit every drug store, discount store, and department store in search of the perfect (and perfectly priced) candy dish shaped like Santa or cookie platter with a grinning reindeer painted on it.

I’m not satisfied until I’ve got something plastic, painted metallic, and obnoxiously Ho-Ho-Ho-ing for every flat surface and spare wall space in my house.

This year I did some calculating.

I have twenty nine Santas on my hearth (which just may be a testament to the merit of a good hearth-builder). Well, of course that won’t do! I’ll have to make that an even thirty this year.  I have eight different colors of garland for the tree…none of which are exactly the right color for this year’s tree. And lights. I have enough strands of lights to make Clark Griswald sob with envy. So many lights, the employees of Aquila send me postcards from their winter vacation homes, thanking me for my generous contribution.

It took me five hours to properly decorate my house for Christmas, which is about four hours and forty nine minutes longer than it took me to decorate it when we moved in. I can’t help it. Things like throw pillows and accent rugs are just beyond me.

But when the cashier asks, “Paper or plastic?” you can bet I’ll know what I’m going to say.    

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