Personal Holiday Horror Stories

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plummeting_sloth
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Personal Holiday Horror Stories

Postby plummeting_sloth » 06 Dec 2013, 15:36

Hello gang. This time of year can raise the stress levels among the best of us, and many of the reasons why that's the case might involve a good story a bit different than the usual venting thread submission. Being briefly back in my own home between holiday sojourns, I thought I'd release tale here before I have to dive right back into it in the coming weeks. Feel free to add your own!

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My Christmas and Thanksgiving horror stories blend together and all focus on one item. An artificial Christmas tree. The DAMNED tree. The DAMNED tree has existed in our extended family for some time, as my mother is allergic to pine and thus needed something artificial since childhood. Of course, at that time, the tree was not yet damned, as my mother's childhood home did not have high ceilings, so it's voltron of hate was not yet fully formed. It was content to rust and shed peaceably, biding it's time.

That time came with the house I grew up in. We finally had cathedral ceilings in the living room and thus, we foolishly thought, could finally assume it's final glorious form. We attached bottom segment (permanently, as we later found out, due to rust and wire-tangling) and gathered round to bask in it's majesty in our first Christmas in our new home. That's when it awoke.

The DAMNED tree was now so large that unless we wanted to throw a tarp over it and never speak of that corner for 11 months out of the year, it needed to go up in the attic. For those of you unfamiliar with my parents house (which is everyone here but R) the upper story is a loft with an attic off to both sides. So, to get it to the attic, that mean carrying up stairs having to hold it over the purely decorative railing to get it under where the floor of the loft sticks out into the living room. It then had to go through a door that was too small for it (of course, all doors were too small for the mighty DAMNED tree), so it had to go through backwards so all the branches would bend to allow it through. And, of course, because the DAMNED tree could now not be dissembled, it had to reach it's seasonal resting place with a crew of my father, my brother and it.

It strained our muscles, the tree. It cut us in a million little places. It bruised us and covered in clothes in the inexhaustible fake dander of an artificial tree that could produce all it needed to match it's hate. It scratched our stairs and bent our bannister and was the only item that could get a rise out of our perpetually dour fat beagle Happy. For 10 years and more, it haunted us. It always went up the day after Thanksgiving, for that was the only time we could be assured that the man-power to placate it would be around. Thanksgiving dinner always assumed, in my mind at least, the nature of a Viking Feast... Eat, Drink and Be Merry, for tomorrow you may die by plastic pine. But... we continued on with it. It became tradition and tradition paved over this self-inflicted hazing in the way tradition always does.

Until one year.

My father, being a much older man than he once was, decided there wasn't much stock left in proving his place at the high table through ordeal, sat down and somehow came up with a easier way of getting the DAMNED tree down. I don't know how he did it exactly (it was already down and assembled by the time I came home) but I suspect, based on subsequent events, that it involved a dark pact made the malevolent force indwelling the tree. It was a lovely holiday season filled with good cheer. Sure, we hadn't figured out a way of returning the tree upstairs as easily as we took it down, but that was a task for our future selves, bleary eyed on New Years Day. Of course, little did we know that the DAMNED tree had felt it had not received a worthy offering for it's sudden mercy. It decided to take it's necessary sacrifice when, as my father was adjusting the tree stand, to bend ever so slightly at just the right time, pinching and then almost severing his finger between juts of rusty metal.

Thankfully, we were able to save the finger (a phrase uttered in our house more often than it probably should) and clean the blood off the presents, but the DAMNED tree had escalated the war and we decided it was time to end it. Once stripped of all it's decorations and finery, out the door it went. Not to the dump though... oh no. That would have been too plain and expected an end. Besides, people pick things out of the dump all the time. We couldn't run the risk of inflicting the DAMNED tree on some new, suspecting family. Out it went instead to the clump of evergreens next to the rose-garden beside our house. Planted in the firm prison of the earth, masked by it's living and un-hatefilled relatives, hidden from all human eyes except those that knew better than to look. It can seethe there till it rusts away.

The following year, we got a tree that zips up in a bag with a self-contained tree stand/rolly cart. It is small enough to be stored in the garage. I think it's being essentially bagged and gagged away from the family 11 months a year as enforced some better behavior. Of course, the new tree is always kept covered when it comes in or goes out. Least it see it's entombed metal god and get any ideas
He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it (Description of U.S. Grant)
Elomin Sha wrote:I love the smell of napalm'd sloths in the morning.
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Re: Personal Holiday Horror Stories

Postby Elomin Sha » 06 Dec 2013, 15:37

I work in retail.
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Re: Personal Holiday Horror Stories

Postby plummeting_sloth » 06 Dec 2013, 15:50

ah, well. Thread over then. And here I was going to talk about the house fire
He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it (Description of U.S. Grant)
Elomin Sha wrote:I love the smell of napalm'd sloths in the morning.
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Re: Personal Holiday Horror Stories

Postby Elomin Sha » 06 Dec 2013, 16:16

I win!
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Re: Personal Holiday Horror Stories

Postby OMGItsSarah » 06 Dec 2013, 16:29

I also work retail.
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Re: Personal Holiday Horror Stories

Postby Duckay » 06 Dec 2013, 18:13

It's only very minor but I caused family discord this year because I told my aunt that I might not be able to come to Christmas dinner because I might have to work. She took it very poorly, telling me that if I'd really wanted to I could have gotten out of working and blah blah get a real job, as if potentially working Christmas day was something I was doing out of spite or foolishness.
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Re: Personal Holiday Horror Stories

Postby ElFuzzy » 06 Dec 2013, 18:15

Duckay wrote:It's only very minor but I caused family discord this year because I told my aunt that I might not be able to come to Christmas dinner because I might have to work. She took it very poorly, telling me that if I'd really wanted to I could have gotten out of working and blah blah get a real job, as if potentially working Christmas day was something I was doing out of spite or foolishness.


That's when you send her an apology fruit cake that's just cement coated in frosting.
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Re: Personal Holiday Horror Stories

Postby plummeting_sloth » 06 Dec 2013, 18:25

ElFuzzy wrote:
That's when you send her an apology fruit cake that's just cement coated in frosting.


Ah, I see you know my uncle Rocko's recipe. He picked it up from a kindly "dockworker" one Christmas Eve. It was kind of like a Wonderful Life. Except this person was trying to drown someone else, not themselves
He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it (Description of U.S. Grant)
Elomin Sha wrote:I love the smell of napalm'd sloths in the morning.
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Re: Personal Holiday Horror Stories

Postby My pseudonym is Ix » 07 Dec 2013, 01:48

On the subject of secret recipes that are vaguely Christmas related (although this is wandering somewhat off the point of the thread), my grandmother happens to make the greatest butterscotch sauce in the world. The reason for this concerns a cruise she went on many years ago in which she tried some of the chef's, thought it was divine, and went along to the kitchens to ask for the recipe. The chef eventually agreed to divulge the secret, but on the condition that the recipe never be allowed to leave the family. This my Gran has stuck to, to the point that my dad upon marrying into the family was given (among other things) a sealed envelope containing the recipe, which he had not been allowed to know up until then.

It's a biazarre family tradition, but it provides a ready source of seasonal gifts every year.
"Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not Image it after all."
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Re: Personal Holiday Horror Stories

Postby plummeting_sloth » 11 Dec 2013, 07:48

My pseudonym is Ix wrote:On the subject of secret recipes that are vaguely Christmas related (although this is wandering somewhat off the point of the thread), my grandmother happens to make the greatest butterscotch sauce in the world. The reason for this concerns a cruise she went on many years ago in which she tried some of the chef's, thought it was divine, and went along to the kitchens to ask for the recipe. The chef eventually agreed to divulge the secret, but on the condition that the recipe never be allowed to leave the family. This my Gran has stuck to, to the point that my dad upon marrying into the family was given (among other things) a sealed envelope containing the recipe, which he had not been allowed to know up until then.

It's a biazarre family tradition, but it provides a ready source of seasonal gifts every year.



My grandpa has a similar thing with his Applejack and pretzel recipes... except the damned fool that got them when he passed away lost them! :(
He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it (Description of U.S. Grant)
Elomin Sha wrote:I love the smell of napalm'd sloths in the morning.

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