I Threw A Holiday Tantrum And Thoroughly Enjoyed Myself — 'I May Or May Not Have Kicked Down My Christmas Tree'
Epic-film | Shutterstock Two years ago, I kicked down our Christmas tree. I not only kicked it down, but I then proceeded to kick it multiple times as it lay prostrate on the floor. It was kind of like that scene in Office Space, the scene in which Peter and his coworkers kick their office printer. If someone had handed me a baseball bat, I definitely would have put it to use.
How, you may ask, had this Christmas tree so grossly offended me? Well, its trunk was too narrow for our Christmas tree stand. Did this particular tree intend to make my life more difficult? I couldn’t tell you. But the glibness of its slender trunk definitely felt personal.
I threw a holiday tantrum and thoroughly enjoyed myself
moomin201 / Shutterstock
This particular tree was supposed to make my life easier. It had been specifically purchased to minimize complications. Over the course of the prior year, my life had become horrendously complicated, and I was on the lookout for a way, any way, to simplify things.
Though I appreciate holiday decorations, I’ve never enjoyed the legwork that goes into the actual decorating part. And that particular year, everything that I used to find moderately tedious had become impossibly overwhelming.
I felt paralyzed by the prospect of packing the family into the car to brave a blustery December wind, then bickering over which tree to pick, then finally making a decision that left one child gloating and one child sulking, then tying the tree to the roof of our car (or more accurately, shivering and pretending to appear helpful while a gracious young person tied the tree onto the roof of our car), then remembering that I’d made a mental note last year (and year before that, and the year before that) that the tree lot only took cash, then running down the street to the nearest ATM and paying a ridiculous ATM fee so I could shell out a ridiculous $75 for a tree, then shelling out even more cash to tip the gracious young person who wrestled the atrocious tree onto our roof.
My children have previously expressed some very strong opinions when it comes to Christmas tree selection, but that year, they were too cool to care. They told Dad and me we could go without them. That was fine by me. Operation Simplify had begun.
I happened to have $40 in cash already on me, so we didn’t go to our usual lot, but rather a strange little store 10 blocks away that had a bunch of trees out on the sidewalk, all for $30 each. Only one was untied, and it looked good enough. Plus, it was only four feet tall and could fit in the trunk! I returned home feeling very smug. The entire outing had taken 20 minutes. I’d beat the system, defied the odds.
The kids laughed at our little tree, but we would make it look festive, and life would go on. Except … there was one problem. We couldn’t make the tree stand upright.
To be clear, I didn’t throw a tantrum right away.
I have rage in me — oh yes, I have rage — but for better or for worse, I wasn’t in the habit of carrying it close to the surface.
By this point, it was Sunday evening, which is the time when any household chores unrelated to meal prep and clean-up must give up any hope of being attended to until the following weekend. Some wait weeks, months, even years…
For seven consecutive days, our undecorated tree leaned and sulked against the wall. I scowled every time I passed by it. The tree brought me no holiday cheer. It was just a reminder of another problem I didn’t have time to solve.
The following Saturday, I arose with determination. I planned to buy a smaller Christmas tree stand from our local Fred Meyer — the Northwest’s local equivalent of Target, except with a worse selection, higher prices, and no one ever available to help you. As soon as I entered the store, I just knew. I just knew they would be out of Christmas tree stands, because while Fred Meyer seems to have a reliable supply of birdseed and throw blankets, it’s always out of everything I actually need.
I was right. I was unable to locate a staff member to actually confirm this, but the shelf marked “Christmas tree stands” was empty, which wasn’t a good sign.
Trying to make the most of an unnecessary trip to a store I hated, I bought a bunch of unnecessary things — presents for the kids that weren’t on their list, tinfoil because maybe we were close to running out, and food items my go-to grocery store doesn’t carry. I left the store with $150 fewer dollars to my name, and no Christmas tree stand.
Maybe my then-husband could sense the danger brewing. He quickly offered to take a trip to our local hardware store, and when he returned with a tree stand in hand, I thought our problems were over. Well, at least one problem. Other problems had been waiting weeks, months, even years…
This was a much smaller tree stand, ostensibly built for smaller trees. But for whatever reason — and please don’t ask me to explain the physics of it — after almost a full hour of tinkering, we still couldn’t make the tree stay upright.
And this, my friends, is when I lost it.
This is when I kicked the stupid, useless tree out of its stupid, useless stand, and then kicked it again, and again, and a few more times, just for good measure. My children watched, their mouths agape. God, it felt good to kick the crud out of that Christmas tree. Am I proud of my behavior? No. Do I regret it? Well, not entirely.
A tree that doesn’t fit in a stand is a very small problem in the grand scheme of things, but maybe that’s why it so monumentally ticked me off. This was supposed to be a solvable problem, and not only that, it was a time-sensitive problem, one that didn’t have the luxury of lounging around for weeks, months, even years…
Or maybe it was precisely the smallness of the problem that inspired me to luxuriate in my fury. The stench of rage has been thick in my home over the past year — from trauma, from powerlessness, from not feeling heard. My newly adolescent daughter has added her own nascent, untamed rage to the cloying stench, a rage that had gathered like storm clouds as it slowly dawned on her that the world sucks far more than she was led to believe.
I had spent the better part of the year managing my family’s rage. Very occasionally indulging in my own, but mostly attempting to mitigate the rage of others, and not always helpfully. What a relief, to indulge in my fury so shamelessly, and to feel it over something as trivial as an obstinate Christmas tree.
The tree, in case you were wondering, ultimately survived. I suppose, technically speaking, it was already dead. But when my daughter saw that mom had officially lost it, she decided to be helpful and put her impressive visual-spatial ability to use.
It was my children who wrangled the tree upright in its stand. Of course, I apologized for losing my head and setting a poor example. Then we hung lights and ornaments while Ella Fitzgerald crooned about chestnuts and open fires.
I’m not sure if trees hold grudges, but I’d like to believe that all was forgiven. It looked truly regal, standing proud, glittering with lights, its branches dripping with ornaments.
That was our last Christmas as a tidy nuclear family unit. Four months later, I would ask my husband for a separation. The following year, when my kids made no mention of The Christmas Tree Incident, I thought maybe my tantrum would end up buried in the vast graveyard of moments doomed to perpetual irrelevance. After all, a lot had happened in the ensuing year.
But this year, when my son saw me carrying boxes of tree lights up from the basement, he said: “Uh-oh. Mom, are you going to start swearing and kicking things again?”
I like to think I have a healthier relationship with my rage these days. I let myself feel, process, and learn from it. This season has so far passed without incident, but it has become clear that 2023 did, in fact, go down in history as the year mom kicked the crud out of the Christmas tree. In all honesty, I’m okay with that.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Mom, Interrupted.
