Everybody have a nice Christmas? I sure did.
How many of you had your Christmas decorations put away before Santa made it back up the chimney? How many of you didn’t realize until October your decorations from last year were still up and just rode it out the save the effort? How often do you see a paragraph made up entirely of questions?
We still get a real tree because there is nothing like the aroma of a Douglas fir in full stank. If I live long enough, I’m sure our decorations will devolve into a stolen poinsettia with a candy cane stuck in the middle for good measure, but for now I want whatever we stick our ornaments and lights on to have been killed with a chainsaw.
While we all know Santa brings most of the toys at Christmas, he sometimes leaves the assembly of said toys to the parents. Anything beyond building a s’more is usually beyond my mechanical prowess, but a recent successful attempt at assembling a child’s tent/tunnel set had artificially inflated my confidence.
Tax Deduction No. 2 always wants to help out when anyone is vacuuming in our house, which is cute until she tries to vacuum the toilet. With this in mind, Santa brought her a toy version of a Dyson Ball vacuum. According to the instructions left by Santa, the Dyson assembly consisted of only two steps. Step 1: Attach handle to base of unit; Step 2: Insert four C batteries.
Upon reading the instructions, visions of sugar plums and getting to bed before midnight danced in my head.
Attaching the handle was a snap. Surely, inserting four C batteries wouldn’t be a problem.
Before I could insert the batteries, I’d have to remove a plastic cover that was held in place by 37 amoeba-sized screws. After the screws were removed, I started placing the batteries in the provided slot. The first three batteries were no problem; it was that fourth one that repeatedly caused the first three to spring from the slot in a rather violent manner.
At one point I asked The Wife — who was working on her own toy assemblage project — to hold down the three batteries while I tried to convince the fourth battery to join its brethren. With all four batteries finally in place I slid the aforementioned cover over the batteries and proceeded to re-install the 37 microscopic battery cover screws.
While in the process of tightening the 37th screw, I heard the batteries shift from within the demon instrument of suction. I wasn’t sure how batteries packed in tighter than a Kardashian’s butt girdle could have possibly broken loose, but they did.
An hour and 40 minutes later, the batteries were finally in their final resting place. I hit the big red button expecting to hear a whir, but all I could hear was a deafening quiet and the intense throb of blood that was pulsating through my ears.
I started retracing my steps over the previous year, wondering what I’d done to cause that obese burglar in the red suit to do this to me. I’d given what I could to charity and helped a few elderly people with their groceries. Sure, I may have snapped on a few people who felt the urge to unload their grievances with the paper on me while I was out in public with my children, but stitches rarely leave a mark these days.
Maybe he was paying me back for the time the cashier was too busy blathering on his phone to realize he’d undercharged me by $12. Nah, I’d imagine Santa would be down with that.
As it happens, a family member had also awakened to find a Dyson toy vacuum left at her house by Santa. We got on the phone and explained the Ken Burns-style drama that we’d just gone through. Apparently, their Dyson toy vacuum was assembled in about one minute and fired up without incident.
I was so, so happy for them.
Admitting defeat, we finally got to bed around 2 a.m. True to form, Tax Deduction No. 2 called out for some hooch around 5 a.m. We wanted to let Tax Deduction No. 1 sleep till at least 7 a.m., so in a flurry of inspiration and ninja-like choreography, I set up my laptop computer on the floor of our bedroom so Tax Deduction No. 2 could watch Cinderella, thus buying us another 90 minutes of "sleep.”
Before the movie was over, Tax Deduction No. 1 ambled into our room. Instead of trying to yank us into the living room, she crawled in bed and started watching the movie. For about 15 minutes, we were having a very Huxtable-like Christmas.
Tax Deduction No. 2 is prone to get excited and react physically to the movie when things get tense, but I didn’t mind taking a Onesie-covered foot to the nose. Compared to the horror I experienced with the toy vacuum, it was almost pleasant.
Around 7:10 a.m., we marched down the hall to see what Santa had left. Tax Deduction No. 2 ran past several items and straight to the dreaded toy vacuum. Our intention was to let her push it around a bit that morning and search for a replacement the next day, but there would be no need.
Without any instruction from us, Tax Deduction No. 2 found the on/off button, pressed it and brought the vacuum to life. In a somewhat mocking manner, the motor in the toy vacuum revved as if it were being simultaneously powered by Shearon Harris and the Hoover Dam. That thing inhaled half of a foot stool before we could shut it off.
Be it a Christmas miracle or spiteful St. Nicholas, we all lived happily ever after. Lord help us all if I ever run into that British nob in the Dyson commercials.
Jon Dawson’s columns appear every Tuesday and Thursday in The Free Press. Contact Jon at 252-559-1092 or jon.dawson@kinston.com. Purchase Jon’s book "Making Gravy in Public" at The Free Press office and at jondawson.com.