Never Negotiate With Children, or: Why My Christmas Tree Stayed up for Months

It all seemed so innocent at the time. It was mid-December, Christmas was still a week or so away, presents were building up into little piles under the tree, and everyone was on their best behavior. There was no way to know that I was about to make one of the biggest mistakes of my life, or at least one of the biggest mistakes of the past few months. (The mistakes that define me all kind of bleed together, at this point. You’ll understand when you get older.)

(Excerpt from A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions)

It seemed like such a simple deal, too. I’d noticed that one of the candy canes we hang on the tree each year had spent the past several days being victimized by gravity, and was inching its way toward inevitable death upon the unyielding planks of the hardwood floor over which it so precariously dangled. Naturally, I made a joke about it.

“When that candy cane falls,” I said with stupid confidence, “we’ll know it’s time to take the tree down.”

My wife and child jumped at the idea, and we all had a fun time being overly dramatic with various metaphors involving the candy cane giving up on life and, consequently, ending the innocence of the holiday season when its body lay shattered and broken beneath the uncaring arms of the tree that rejected it.

Okay, maybe that was mostly me with the metaphors, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that my child took me seriously, and it was decided then and there that we would leave our Christmas tree up until that candy cane had fallen.

You can probably see where this is going…

Before I get into what happened, it’s important to note how hard I work to try and always keep my word, especially to my kid. It’s something my own father taught me, to a ridiculous fault.

For example, when I started driving an ancient pick-up truck held together by duct tape and dirt when I was 16, my dad offered to pay my insurance indefinitely, as long as I never got a ticket.

I’m 43 now. I’ve never had a ticket.

I’ve no doubt that poor man would still be paying my insurance to this day, if I hadn’t let him off the hook years ago when I became an adult. That’s just the kind of guy my dad is. He always keeps his word, and it’s one of the many valuable lessons he’s taught me by example over the years.

Which leads me to the problem. You can see it, can’t you? I gave my word that we wouldn’t take the tree down until the candy cane had fallen.

This was a mistake.

To further complicate matters, I made a joke about the whole situation over on Twitter, where a friend of mine in Japan chimed in and offered to send us a package if we still had the tree up when Easter rolled around, which I stupidly told my kid about, and that was that. We’d crossed the Rubicon. There was no turning back.

I talk about my kid a lot on social media, to the point where I’m fairly certain a large number of strangers feel like he’s part of their family. Through my relentless photos and updates on his life, they have, after all, watched him grow up. They’re invested.

People he’s never met have sent him things from abroad before, too. Once, a friend in Poland sent us a box of Polish candies and various goodies, and another friend in Canada sent us a box of weird Canadian chips and maple pancake gravy. The point is, people love him (naturally), and they sometimes send us things. He especially likes receiving international packages, so there was no way he’d ever forget about our deal once I told him about a potential gift from Japan.

The tree wasn’t going anywhere.

As the days after Christmas became weeks and the weeks became months, I began to give up all hope that we’d ever be rid of the dead thing in our living room. I’d unplugged the lights once it was clear we were in this for the long haul, but I never imagined how stubbornly that wretched candy cane would cling to life.

By the time it finally fell, it had been defying the natural laws of physics for about a week or so, somehow managing to hold on to a branch that had nearly gone vertical. I’d begun to suspect that someone had super glued the thing, but I wasn’t brave enough to touch it to see if it moved.

Yes, I eventually became as invested in the candy cane’s survival as our son. After a point, it just became an object of fascination for me. How long could this go on?

The day it finally fell was pretty dramatic. I was watching TV when it happened: out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of movement and heard a rustling in the branches. This, in and of itself, was not unusual at this point. It was late January, and ornaments had been dropping off the tree since my birthday earlier in the month. However, this time I saw some white and red streak down, so I jumped out of my chair to investigate.

The candy cane had fallen, but not all the way to the ground. The dang thing had caught itself on yet another branch halfway through its fall, and was holding on for dear life. I called my kid to come see. He came and saw. Then, a few hours later, it fell again.

Again, it did not touch the ground. It only hovered mere inches over the floor, having caught itself this time upon a string of lights that was drooping from the bottom branches of the tree. My worst fear had been realized: the candy cane wasn’t going anywhere now. All hope was lost. The tree had become part of me now, part of my life. I would die with it by my side, haunting my dreams, the soundtrack of my life punctuated by the rainfall of every other ornament splashing to the ground. Every ornament except that accursed candied cane.

Never give up.
Never surrender.

Remembering that the only difference between a happy ending and a sad one is where you stop the story, I clung to the dream that, one day, a miracle would happen: maybe one of our dogs would grab the candy cane off the tree, or maybe the lights would droop low enough that some part of it would eventually touch the ground. My secret hope was that, at the very least, Easter would get here before the tree burst into flames and started giving me commandments.

Of course, none of these things actually happened. That’s the thing about miracles. You never can tell what shape they’ll take.

A package arrived on our doorstep this weekend. I do not know from whence it came, or by whom it was sent, but there it was, all the same: a plain, cardboard box with no return address.

I should’ve been worried. I’ve spent a large part of my life making people angry on the internet, and suspicious packages have caused problems in the past, but for whatever reason, I threw caution to the wind this time and just opened that sucker up. Inside, there was a smaller package, surrounded by packing peanuts. I reached in, and slowly lifted my prize from the box like some kind of religious leader revealing a sacred artifact to his congregation, except no one was home but me. Still, it was pretty impressive. Pretty sure I heard angels.

Someone had sent what appeared to be a Super Mario figurine of Japanese origin to my front door.

My miracle had just happened.

Seizing the opportunity to finally be rid of the evergreen monstrosity decaying in my living room, I immediately set to work removing what few ornaments hadn’t yet plunged to the ground, but I left the candy cane for last. I wanted to remember this moment. To savor it.

I sent a quick video text to my kid of me removing the candy cane and tossing it to the ground, which was not met with a positive reaction. I probably should’ve led with the whole Japanese package thing, but whatever. I told him about it eventually.

Once I’d removed all the ornaments, I began wrestling with the various strands of lights I’d so smartly layered deeper and deeper into the tree to create a beautiful effect back when Christmas was on the horizon and the pine needles were still soft. Now, though, the tree was filled with little stilettos, each branch holding a veritable arsenal of tiny death daggers that stabbed at my tender bits each time I reached in to untangle yet another bundle of wires.

Eventually, it was done. The tree was bare. All that was left was to put it out on the curb for the city to pick up later.

It was at this time that it occurred to me that I was about to put a dead Christmas tree out on the curb in front of my home. In March. Three months after Christmas. What would the neighbors think?

I panicked, which is when I slipped into full-on paranoia mode as if I’d just committed murder.

Not wanting anyone to know my secret shame, I decided then and there that I’d hide the crime. I went into the laundry room and grabbed a handsaw from my toolbox, then turned and headed back to the living room. To the body.

I spent the next several minutes creating a nightmare crime scene of pine needles and dried tree sap as I hacked the corpse of our once happy tree into tiny, manageable pieces. My plan was to keep them in the house where they’d go unseen as I slowly added one or two pieces to my garbage can each week. No one would see the tree on the curb that way. No one would ever know.

The perfect crime.

Unfortunately, while I’d managed to chop up the trunk into small logs, I hadn’t factored in how wide each section would be with all the branches jutting out. There was no way I was going to be able to fit any of them into my garbage can, especially the lower pieces where the branches were the longest.

I panicked again, but eventually calmed down long enough to concoct yet another plan. This time, I would wait until the dead of night, then I would take each piece and sort of scatter them along the curb in front of a shrubbery we have out there. With any luck, it’d just look like we’d done some yard work recently, and no one would be able to tell that the scattered remains had once been a Christmas tree.

Of course, after putting all the pieces outside, I realized that I’d left a trail of pine needles and snapped branches leading directly to my front door.

I did not, however, panic this time. Instead, I just grabbed a broom and started sweeping the evidence away, like some kind of Old West outlaw covering his tracks by dragging branches over the dirt behind him. Keep in mind, I was doing all of this at roughly 3:00am Sunday morning, which isn’t at all weird or anything.

Don’t judge me.

After I’d done enough to convince myself that no one would be able to trace the tree’s corpse back to me, I went inside and surveyed the damage. There was carnage everywhere. Bits of broken branches were scattered in places they had no right to be, and the blood spatter of pine needles definitely indicated a crime had been committed here. I had to clean it up. I had to clean everything up.

I spent the next hour or so sanitizing the murder site until my living room slowly began to look like nobody had hacked up the dead body of a decaying Christmas tree in the middle of it or anything, and I could finally go to bed. It was about 4:30 in the morning at this point, and I was pretty tired.

And that’s how I spent my weekend: committing aboral murder and hiding the evidence. You know, like people do.

The moral of this story, if there is one, is to be careful what deals you make with your children. You never know what twists and turns life might take, and even the most innocent of promises can become a nightmare scenario that could very well scar you for life.

In my dreams, I can still hear the tree.

It’s screaming.

UPDATE: I’ve been discovered.

UPDATE 2: This year’s candy cane has been chosen. The tree will stay up until it falls. It is known.

UPDATE #3: January 4, 2020 – The mighty have fallen. Trey has been informed. Please respect our family’s privacy in these difficult times.

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NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

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