The Christmas tree is retired to it’s off-season home (front closet, big red box – this year I sat on the tree and actually got the entire tree IN the box!). Princess wanted to know why we couldn’t leave it up longer.
“It’s been up for over 5 weeks. That’s more than a month – and that’s long enough.”
“But everyone else still has their tree up!”
“If everyone else jumps off a bridge, would you do it too?”
And a bit joyful Thank you, to the person in my family that taught my husband this phrase over the holidays. I don’t know how we’ve made it through 15 years of parenting without using it. It was right up there with “Life’s not fair” (which is the only correct answer to “That’s not fair!”) as my absolute favorite parental responses when I was growing up.
My take on this as a parent has been to ban the word fair, unless we’re talking about skin tone or weather. My daughter calls it “the ‘f’ word”, which raises some questioning eyebrows amongst the PTA set when she wistfully says “I would say it’s the ‘f’ word but I’m not allowed to.”
Raised eyebrows aside, my holiday is back in the boxes for another year. The last of the box-garbage sits by the door, waiting for good garbage day weather so it can survive a night on the curb without becoming curb mulch. And I still have no food in the house after 3 full days back home. So it’s off to the store I go.
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