Rage Against the Christmas Tree

Thanksgiving 1990 kicked off a tough holiday season, gift wrapped by an all-too-familiar holiday depression. Irritability and irrational anger took hold: I was pissed off at society, that the day after Thanksgiving I was expected to be bustling with good-neighborly, holiday glee. I wasn't happy, damn it, and all this forced jolliness was about as disgusting to me as runny baby poop.

Vacillating between a short-fuse temper and depression, I planned to sleep away the holidays. My co-workers at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times had other ideas. They encouraged me to get a Christmas tree.

"It'll brighten your spirits," the one editor said.

"Yeah," another editor chimed in, "come on, Cathy. Get a tree. You'll feel better."

"Maybe I don't wanna feel better," I snapped.

At home the next day, I tossed and turned on my couch, thinking of childhood Christmas Eves when I’d be silly: put bows on my head, tie ribbon around my face, and wedge myself under the family's artificial Christmas tree, playing out my annual role as a jeans-clad baby Jesus. Christmas wasn't always so bad. There were some good moments. Until Daddy came home.

Until I started going to those damn Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings, I thought. Those fuckers have ruined my childhood.

"Oh, hell!" I growled, rolling off the couch and putting on my shoes. I was off to get a tree.

Minutes later, I stood in the seasonal forest that emerged every December outside the local Albertson’s grocery store. The scent of pine was invigorating. I caught myself smiling. Finally, I saw it: a big tree with few bald spots. I paid the clerk, who helped me load it onto the roof of my Hyundai Excel, and I was off, singing along out of tune with an Amy Grant holiday cassette tape. Back home, I pulled the tree off the car roof, lugged it into my townhouse living room, leaned it against the wall, and gave my two cats a “no climbing” lecture. Hand over fist, I pulled out the lights and the garland and the bulbs and the tree stand from the under-the-stairs closet. Still humming tunes from the Amy Grant tape, I loosened the screws in the tree stand and lifted the tree’s trunk into place.
 

It didn’t fit.

Dumbfounded, I stared at the tree. It didn’t make sense to me that the trunk wouldn’t fit in the stand. I loosened the screws as far as they would go and tried again.

The tree still didn’t fit.

“Huh,” I said, stunned and a bit perturbed.

Grumbling under my breath, I leaned the tree against the wall and marched into the kitchen to grab the knife I used to carve my first Thanksgiving Day turkey a few weeks earlier. Like a woman possessed by a bah-humbug demon, I assumed a deep, solid horse stance from my Taekwondo days, held the knife handle with both hands, and began carving chunks of bark from the tree’s trunk. I sliced and I shaved, sliced and shaved. After a few minutes, I stopped, lifted the tree, and tried to place the trunk into the tree stand.

It still wouldn’t fit.

“Shit!”

Rage raced through my body. I hated that tree much like Mamma hated an always-drunk Daddy. A memory flash of Mamma pummeling Daddy with a fresh loaf of Buttercrust bread sparked my next move. In a Tazmanian Devil-like trance, I took the handle of that knife and began shaving the tree’s trunk repeatedly and wildly in a herky-jerky attack, screaming a string of obscenities.

Shaving, shaving, shaving, shaving, shaving, shaving…

I snapped, and then blacked out.

When I came to, I stood frozen before a mangled and mutilated tree trunk with the knife still in my hand and sweat rolling down my cheeks. Chunks of bark were scattered all over the teal carpet. Gooey sap, too. And blood. There was blood on the knife, blood on my T-shirt, blood on the tree, and drops of blood on the carpet. In my maniacal state, I had sliced my thumb open.

I stepped back from the tree in shock. What just happened? How did I get so out of control? The rage seemed to come out of nowhere. And all over a tree? Really?

I dropped to my knees, exhausted, bleeding, and shaking. I was terrified at what I had done. But the longer I stared at the tree, the more I slowly became repossessed.

Pacing in half-moon circles like a shark preparing for an attack, I lunged forward, grabbed the tree, and placed the trunk in the stand.

It still didn’t fit.

“Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!” I screamed, stomping up and down.

I yanked the patio door wide open and with Herculean strength hoisted the tree on my shoulders and heaved it outside with an angry grunt.

“Die, you motherfucker piece of shit!”

Slamming the door closed, I stomped into the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of rum, and returned to the same uncomfortable couch where all this mess started. I got drunk and wrote stupid Christmas cards, trying to fake jolliness. I didn't realize until three months later that, in my alcoholic stupor, I had addressed some of the cards to the wrong people.

"We got your Christmas card," my sister Susan said in March. "Who's Lynnette?"

Seven months later, I stopped drinking. I haven't mutilated a tree since.