hung and angry

While it’s nice during the holidays to be perched on top of the tree I’m guessing that the rest of the year sitting in that big cardboard box with the rest of the decorations must be awkward. There is no way that the ‘star’ isn’t catching attitude from the other ornaments.

Especially the really expensive or elaborate ones. They have got to be thinking to themselves that just because they don’t have 5 points doesn’t mean they should be lower on the tree than any other ornament. Where the fuck does the star get off feeling all high and mighty just because it is sitting on top?

And don’t tell me the hand-made decorations the kids have been churning out in school all these years don’t wonder aloud why the star gets the best spot. Somewhere amid all the glitter and glue there has to be a seething resentment that despite all the love that went into their creation that some store-bought cliché is hogging all the attention.

Every year when the closet is opened and the box hauled out into the light there must be at least a little anticipation on the part of the other decorations that this is the year that they get hoisted atop the tree, to spend the holidays looking down on all their contemporaries.  That this is the year they get to shine. That all the boys and girls will gather around and look up at them and pay attention to them and sing about them! At the very least I’m sure they are secretly hoping that the owners of the tree have found a new and better star and that the smug little prick sitting in its box awaiting its inevitable adornment as the ‘star’ will instead be callously hurled into the garbage as all of the other ornaments hoot and heckle and laugh.

But instead every year the same star is plopped atop the tree where it spends 2 or 3 weeks basking in the glow of the colored lights and tinsel while its plastic brethren hang beneath him incensed, looking pretty and twinkling and such as they fight to control their unbridled rage. If they do end up controlling it then it would be of course a bridled rage but the truth is one of these days one of them is going to snap so I feel justified in using the term unbridled. Maybe snap is actually what happens and explains the ones that mysteriously fall off and plummet to the carpeting to be immediately stepped on with uncanny predictability by the dog. Either way, I needed a few more words to fill out the story so having to explain my bridled and unbridled rationale was just the opportunity I was looking for.

You wonder how much more they can take. The ones doing the real work during the holiday. How it is they can bear to look festive as every year they hang in a different spot to view the holiday from  another angle that is just as underappreciated as the year before?

Then to be packed up again and forced to sit in the same box as the ‘star’.

Must be rough on the star.