A Very Tangee Christmas

I hadn't planned on posting any more Buck and Tangee stories, but it is Christmas and Susan asked, so...

This is from the beginning of the third section of the B & T novel.

If the Fourth of July is my holiday, the rest of the year belongs to Tangee. Her home-decorating year starts with Valentine’s Day. I have to drag out the pink and white six-foot tall plywood heart with the pink and white lights hung on it and she changes the clothes on the concrete goose so that he looks like a little cupid. For Memorial Day we do lots of flags and red, white and blue lights and they stay up for the Fourth of July and Labor Day. The pink flamingoes on the lawn get little Uncle Sam hats.

By the first of October Tangee’s decorating juices get going again and she starts planning our Halloween display. Along with the red-lit graves and plastic tombstones we’ve got about a thousand feet of orange Christmas style lights and my stereo speakers buried in the lawn playing spooky sounds. If there isn’t any wind we hang a bucket of water from the tree and drop dry ice in as the night goes along. I point my old eight-millimeter movie projector at the dry ice fog and show a movie of ghosty shapes. The flamingos get teeny, tiny vampire teeth and black capes. If we do too much it scares away the little kids and we wind up with a bunch of left over candy corn and milk duds. Sometimes I get bad dreams about the flamingoes.

But Halloween is just a warm-up. Christmas is the main event.

It was early December and Tangee was studying our plaster lawn population, “No,” she said, “it’s the fairies, then the elves, then the gnomes.”

I said, “But last year it was the other way—gnomes first.”

“No, I remember, it goes by size, tallest to smallest.”

“Oh, okay, I’m sorry. I thought it was fattest to skinniest.” I reset their little plaster feet in the dead grass.

“That’s better. See? Now it’s just like a little parade and they’re all on they’re way to see the baby Jesus.”

“Looks like they’re on their way to see Santa Claus, too,” I said. “Should he really be so close to the manger?”

“Oh, you’re just like those people on the contest committee. Maybe we shouldn’t have had Santa sitting on the roof of the manger last year, but we still should have won.”

The Huron Bay Beacon runs a contest every year for the best decorated home, and every year somebody else wins.

Tangee said, “I still think the Ozinskis paid off somebody at the newspaper. All they had were plain white and blue lights and some kind of tinsel stuff blowing in the wind. I bet that was a mess to clean up. We had twice as many lights as they did and all colors too, not just white and blue. And we had a manger and the gnomes and we had a Santa.”

“And Santa on the roof of the stable,” I reminded her.

“It was only silly because stables don’t have chimneys. We should have thought of that. This year he’s just standing there.”

“Yup,” I said, “the fourth wise man.”

“Too close?” she asked.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Tangee looked up at the roof of the house and said, “I just wonder where we could put him, then?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Oh, no. I told you, nothing on the roof. Period.”

“But, Buck, it’s mild and nice and there’s no snow yet and you could just tie the big inflatable Santa to the chimney with a bungee cord and maybe string a few hundred lights around the eaves. We wouldn’t have to use the reindeer.”

“Nope. It’s nice now, but in January you’re going to want him down and it’s not going to be so nice then, and there’s going to be ice and I’m not going to do it.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have to take him down.”

I shook my head. “You’re the one who gets depressed when you see people with their Christmas stuff up halfway into spring. You’re the one who drives two blocks out of her way so you won’t have to see the wreath Gwen and Phyllis leave up until June. You’re the one who called the police to see if there was a law about leaving wreaths up out of season.”

“Well, then,” she said, “long about the second week of January, if it was icy, maybe you could just go out in the yard with your twenty-two and deflate him.” Tangee must have caught a mental picture of a shot, deflated, plastic Santa hanging from a bunge cord from the chimney until April. She shook her head, dismissing the idea.

“Well, what are we going to do then?” she said. “We have to have something special with the Santa Claus. We’ve got the gnomes and all and we got the manger and we got lights around all the windows and in all the shrubs and on the mailbox. We got the spinning aluminum tree by the garage. It’s all very classy but I think we need something splashy to win the contest. I just don’t know.”

Tangee looked sad and defeated as she walked out to the street to view what we’d done so far. Just before the ditch we’ve got what’s left of a hedge running parallel to the road. It had grown to about two feet high before that problem with the sewer killed it. She walked past the dead hedge and past the ditch and across the street to get a judge’s eye view of the yard. She came back grinning.

“Is the ground froze?” she asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Have we still got those iron clothes poles in the garage?”

“Yup. Up in the rafters. Why?”

“Bucky, this will be perfect. When the judges drive by and stop in front of our house, they’ll see all of our decorations, just like we’ve got them, but they’ll see them through a kind of picture frame.” She brought me into the house to explain.

The idea was that we’d trim the dead hedge bushes to look like mountains and spray them with phony snow and cover them with forty strings of white blinking lights. Then we’d string a wire between the two metal clothes poles, which I would have pounded in the ground. The last thing would be that we’d hang the inflatable Santa in his sled along with his eight inflatable reindeer from the wire. The judges would look through the scene of Santa flying over the mountains to view the gnomes and the manger and the aluminum tree.

The next day was a Sunday. I made Tangee promise that if I got all of that work done by Saturday night, she’d let me watch football and nap the next day. I’ll do some awful things to get a guaranteed football/nap day. I was done by midnight.

Judging was the second Saturday of December and Tangee was beside herself waiting for the big day. She kept busy by planting a forest of candy canes in front of Fat Boy’s doghouse and making other important finishing touches. The pink flamingoes got halos and angel wings. We turned on the hedge lights one time to make sure they worked…Tangee was worried about showing the total effect too early in case somebody wanted to steal her idea.

The Friday night before the judging she couldn’t sleep and went outside at midnight with flashlight and a jar of blue craft paint to retouch the baby Jesus’ eyes. At four in the morning she plugged in all the lights for a minute to make sure they’d work. From six AM until noon she watched the Weather Channel, worrying about a frontal system in Wisconsin which might or might not make it to our house before the committee drove by at seven-thirty. She made a walk around the yard at one in the afternoon and came back in a panic.

“It’s Dasher and Dancer,” she wailed. “They’re deflating. You have to do something.”

I dragged the ladder out to the display and found she was right; the lead pair of deer were shriveling and Dancer’s head was half folded over. Dasher’s air filler cap was located just about where I expect you’d find a reindeer’s navel. I prayed nobody I knew would drive by while I was reinflating. It didn’t matter. The more I inflated the more Dasher deflated. There was a leak. In fact, just at the base of Dancer’s neck a whole seam was coming apart.

“Bucky, what are we going to do? Look. Comet and Cupid are leaking, too.”

“Maybe we could fill them with something,” I suggested.

“Like newspapers?” she asked.

“Maybe. Or, we still have a whole bunch of that Styrofoam popcorn- shaped packing stuff don’t we? I could make a hole and fill them with that and seal it with duct tape.”

“Anything, Bucky. Hurry.”

It worked. Dasher and Dancer filled out just fine, and to make sure the other deer and Santa Claus didn’t have the same problem, I filled them with Styrofoam, too. They were a little lumpy but I didn’t figure you could tell that from the road.

By six o’clock it was dark. At seven we turned on the hedge lights. A half-hour later we saw three cars full of judges, driving slowly up the street, pausing at each display.

Santa floated gently over the hedge mountains with the phony snow and the four thousand blinking white lights and the thick billows of drifting clouds. Exactly as planned. Except for the clouds. We hadn’t planned on thick puffy white clouds of smoke drifting over the hedge. We also hadn’t planned on a fire in the hedge, which was where the puffy smoke was coming from. One of the forty strands of lights must have shorted out.

The puffy white clouds turned black as the phony snow caught fire. Two by two the reindeer smoldered into brown lumps hanging over the flames. Then the judges stopped. They watched for what seemed to be a very long time. I stood in the doorway next to Tangee. She was crying. The judges left just before the fire department got there. I helped clean up and Tangee went to bed early.

It was real quiet at our house the next morning. The paper came at noon. We were front-page news. I read the story to Tangee.

“Congratulations to Buck and Tangee Crimmins on winning the annual Christmas décor contest! Although there were many beautiful displays this year, the committee decided that the Crimmins’ originality should be rewarded. Their spectacular interpretation of ‘The Christmas Song’ is well worth our first prize.”

I held up the accompanying picture, showing the brown plastic lumps hanging just above the licking flames of the hedge.

“The Christmas Song?” Tangee asked.

“Sure. Remember? ‘Chestnuts roasting on an open fire?’”

She put the prize, a golden wreath, on the mantle. Next year I think we’ll stick to gnomes and the spinning aluminum tree.