It's no secret that I am a Christmas idiot. When Halloween ends, I'm all about Christmas. I start planning to put up my tree, start my shopping, and plan my Thanksgiving Dinner so I can get it out of the way and concentrate on Christmas. This year it has been a nightmare!

Thanksgiving was at my house, so I assembled my tree, left it in the porch house until the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I had about twenty folks for Thanksgiving Dinner, and out of the five women over twenty there, my thirty year old daughter and I were the only two fully mobile. My sister-in-law had to undergo colon surgery two weeks before Thanksgiving, and my sister had just got out of rehabilitation because of a knee replacement. That's two down, and a seventy-five year old Aunt that can hardly breathe, let alone putter around in the kitchen to help me. I refused to let my daughter stay inside and help me because her fiancé was there with her. So, that left, me and me. Needless to say by the time the first ones arrived by 10 a.m. that morning, and the last ones left after 9 p.m. that night, I felt like someone had wound a key up in my back, and it didn't unwind. After cleaning up, I crawled in bed, and got up at 5 a.m. the next morning to go to work. My hubby had taken off to be with the grandson.

My boss informed me that I'd be working with my hubby the first week of December so my "stand in" could get a refresher course for when I was going to be off a few days around Christmas. Not only do the two of us work at the same place, we travel back and forth together unless there is something going on that we both need to take our vehicles.

The first morning I am with him in his office, I spill a diet coke on his desk, all over Purchase Orders, Invoices, etc. You would've thought I'd burned down his office and the maintenance shop that it is built above. I'm sure all of his guys that worked for him heard us screaming at each other. After we got his desk cleaned, he left. I buzzed our boss on the intercom and told him what had happened. He knew I just wanted to get out of there. His response was, "Don't spill anything else."

"Well hell," I thought. So for the next five days, if I didn't have to leave the plant to go do things for the hubby, we were constantly bickering. We got in on Wednesday, I got my Christmas tree into the house and asked him to get my decorations down out of the porch house. (I'm not allowed to dig around in there. He says I make a mess of how he has things arranged.) He told me he didn't have time that he'd do it the next day. So, the next evening, after another, "Go to hell", "I hate you", "You're a bastard", day at work, I asked him to get them out again. He forgot. He came in later, ate dinner, showered, and went to bed to watch television. I walked to the bedroom door and snidely said, "Thanks for getting the decorations out for me."

"If you don't hush about it, I won't get them at all. I'm tired." He didn't even look at me, but at the television as he spoke.

"Good enough," I thought. I went back into the living room, quietly took the tree apart, and took it out in front of the fence in the front yard by the trash cans and left it there. "garbage truck ran the next day." I quietly slipped back into the house.

An hour or so later, he came out of the bedroom, walked into the living room and asked, "What did you do with the tree?"

"Threw it away." I didn't look at him as I spoke.

"Why did you throw it away? Somebody could've used it." He looked furious.

I was even angrier. "Whadda you mean someone else could've used it? Why don't I just use it to stick it up your a--?"

He went and got it from beside the road out of more concern of what people would think, and I refused to let him put it back in the house. Watching him go in the porch house to put it up, I closed the door of the porch house and padlocked it from the outside, and went in the house. He started banging on the door. I knew he wouldn't kick the door down because he would never destroy something he worked for. He just doesn't believe in it. After about an hour, and knowing it was getting colder, I went and unlocked the door. He was calmly sitting there drinking a beer, (we keep two refrigerators out there and our freezers) while looking at an old Playboy magazine he'd found in a box. Well, that went over like a ton of bricks. I stomped back into the house, got a shower and went to sleep in the guest room. I heard him come in later, fix the coffee pot, and lock the doors.

The next morning I got up earlier than normal with full intentions of leaving him to go to work alone in a separate vehicle. He'd beat me to it. He was up and gone. So, I took my time, and barely made it to his office by seven a.m. He didn't even look up when I came in, but said, "I'll buy you a real tree and help you put it up this weekend."

"I've decided not to do a tree. I'm going to decorate the hearth, and put all the gifts around it. That way, we'll have more room when everyone comes the weekend before Christmas. Anyway, we won't be here for Christmas Eve and Christmas DAy. We'll be at the kids. They can take all the presents back with them the weekend before."

"Are you sure? I'll take you to the tree farm and let you get a real one. I know you'd rather have one." He was very contrite and genuine.

"It will be less for me to do. I'll do a little more to the hearth, add lights to my garland, and it should be fine."

So, after a week of "holy hell", I decided not to do a tree, and so glad I did. My hearth is not finished, but must look great because when Kyle saw it, he says, "Nana, that's awesome!" Then after a minute he said, "Where's the tree?"

I then explained how after everyone left the weekend before Christmas that he would be taking all the gifts back to his house to put under his tree. "fist pump" "Yeah," he said excitedly.

So, after all the bickering, fighting, cursing, and finally coming to an understanding, Kyle opened my eyes once more to the real meaning of Christmas. The smile on a child's face.