One goddamn string of lights is out!
Well, 'tis the season - at night, other than the Great Wall of China, the only other thing that can be seen from outer space is: our house (although it is a very, very, very fine house).
My housemates, of 20 years, John & Tony, LOVE to decorate the house at Christmas. Tony is sent up on to the roof, generally in October to put all of the outside house lights in place (before weather makes that a suicide mission). The outside trees and bushes can then be done at leisure.
Right after Thanksgiving and once poor Tony (the only one still agile enough) brings all of the boxes of ornaments up from the basement - they fill up the guest bedroom in its entirety. Christmas, especially for gay men (I don't mean to call out any one group, but if you can name another who is, in a preternaturally large percentage, associated with good taste and creativity then please do keep me posted) as Christmas allows for the very tasteful to dip their toes in, dare I say it, the Sea of Gaudy.
As long as taste and elegance have been restored by Epiphany.
In fact, it is a widely held belief, amongst a very large group of our friends, that any house, any where, that has Christmas decorations up after the 6th of January, must sadly be the home of people who drink way too much to care. Although strands of just white lights are always in good taste. In a car of any size, with any combination and permutation of our friends, the ones we see all the time and the ones we see once every few years, if we pass a house with Christmas stuff happening outside of the allotted time period, all conversation stops, and just like a Greek chorus, we cast our eyes downwards, and whisper, out of the sides of our mouths, "Alcoholics".
Anyway, this year is rather low-key and we have just the one tree. Perfectly shaped and decorated, precisely as John's mother taught him - small ornaments at the top and then growing in size with the very largest baubles at the bottom. It truly is magnificent and I have seen more than one straight man clutch his pearls and mutter "stunning" under his breath. This year is a "bubble lights" year which Tony & I adore (and John does not).
Last year had been a non-bubble light year and so we hung the movie star ornaments on the main tree as well (they have often had their own tree in other years). Ours, I can absolutely guarantee you, is the only household, in the world, in which it is possible for the following exchange to have actually happened last year:
Me: Uh-oh
John: What?
Me: I believe Myrna Loy just fell off the tree.
And sure enough she had. This year, the movie stars are adorning the oleander.
For the first ten years that we lived here - I was always away at work, hearing Christmas carols played on the steel drum. Really never did get used to that. Anyway, at some point, John had decided to go through my boxes of Christmas ornaments which I had packed up when mummy died and never looked at again. Lo and behold, he found the little wooden crèche that had belonged to my mother's mother and perhaps went even further back to Ireland. The house here had been always been manger-free until then but for some reason John brought it out.
Now, this is "Crèche Fucking Central". The boys have collected either whole manger scenes or parts thereof in their travels over the last 20 years. I was quite moved, the first year I was living here on a full-time basis, to see the crèche of my childhood that had always been on our mantle at home. Upon closer inspection however, I found that a pink Cadillac and a turkey, that is way larger than scale, had apparently also made their way to Bethlehem. Part of the reason for the turkey being so large is that once you lift up the turkey, there is a couple illustrating one of the many, many positions of the kama-sutra. Oh, holy night, indeed!
Now, there is one Nativity that is all gold (which would be OTT at any other time of year, but is perfectly perfect just now). There was another that was basically just three large wisemen, so we always thought of that one as them packing for their road trip to Bethlehem. Sadly, Tony took out two of those wisemen last year when he fell down the steps and cracked a couple of his ribs. A couple of other manger scenes are also scattered about the house.
Santa Claus? I cannot even begin to guess the number but there is not a place to cast one's eye in the kitchen in which there is nary a Santa. But then again, the kitchen is black & white with red accents so it was just made for Santamania.
We are having a very small sit-down tomorrow night and I must remember to point out two things to our guests - one would be to not let the dessert I have made get anywhere near the candles. The bourbon content is high.
And the other, is to point out our favourite of all of the nativity scenes. It is a wee, small one and was brought back from one of John & Tony's many trips to Italy but sadly, the Blessed Mother had been decapitated on the trip home. No worries though, we hooked Joseph up with one of the wisemen and voilà -
Jesus has two daddies!
Merries & Ho's to one and all!
