by RAF KATIGBAK

“Try and keep the holiday spirit all year long.” That’s what it said when I recently unfolded the little white slip from my fortune cookie. My first reaction was bewilderment: “How did they know it was the holiday season?” (“They” of course being the impish fortune cookie elves I imagine create these mysterious crunchy communication confections.) My second thought was, “Hold up, I already do keep the holiday spirit alive all year long, although probably in the shittiest way possible.”

In the picturesque and well-manicured West Island neighbourhood of my youth, my house was probably the closest thing to living in a trailer park. While my sisters might argue that it was only because we were the last house on the street before a creepy dead end, I like to think it had something to do with the rusted car we had up on cinderblocks in our driveway, the squirrel that had made its home in our roof after tearing an entrance into our aluminum siding, and the fact that we had kept Christmas lights on all year round.

While I liked to explain to my high school friends that the reason for the latter, why my father kept half-burnt-out yellow, red and blue bulbs lit up on our maple tree all day, every day, for the entire year, was—as the fortune cookie suggested—“because he wanted to feel the Christmas spirit all year,” I knew in my heart that it was just plain old laziness. I tried to sell my father as “a fun-loving guy who just wanted to keep the party going,” but I knew my friends weren’t buying it.

And I don’t blame them. It wasn’t just the Christmas lights; there was a tattered plastic Santa on the roof, a sun-bleached plastic cutout Halloween witch in the window, a few deflated pink and blue “Happy Birthday” balloons from my brothers seventh birthday ribboned to the fire hydrant out front (he was 14 by then), and probably about half-a-dozen rotten Easter eggs lying undiscovered in the Boxwood bushes that surrounded our house. In the end, what could have been a cute little red and white split-level suburban home ended up looking like the discount decoration bin at Jean Coutu had been invaded by a family of Filipinos, and then exploded.

While I’ve never been a stickler for tradition, there are a few yuletide activities from my father that I insist on keeping. One is dressing up in my fanciest attire, heading to the hotel district downtown, and crashing as many big office parties as possible in one weekend, getting blindly drunk on free booze and grinding with middle-aged secretaries while on-looking “co-workers” whisper to each other, “I don’t know... I think he’s the new guy in accounting...”

The other, of course, is to decorate my apartment with the tackiest Christmas ornaments I can find and make it a point not to take it down until one of my roommates yells at me, or a cease and desist order citing some obscure city ordinance appears mysteriously in the mail.

I don’t know what it is about other over-decorators that I find so fascinating. Why every time I drive by those brightly lit houses with mechanical dancing Santas, musically-triggered Christmas lightshows, seven-foot inflatable snowmen and legions of plastic moulded reindeer frolicking in still life on the front lawn, I stop and stare with an awed mix of joyful seasonal bliss and the morbid fascination of some six-car autoroute pile-up. Maybe it’s the wholehearted attempt to spread Christmas joy and good tidings mixed with their brash fuck-you to the people trying to sleep across the street while 30,000 watts of “Magical Twinkling Christmas Icicles” are blinking into their bedrooms all night.

I suppose if I had to really think about why I like to spend hours in front of these elaborately ornamented houses, it’s perhaps not the blend of frightening cult-like adherence to seasonal celebration and balls-out unabashed dedication to next-level tackiness, but rather that if you observe the house from the right angle, it looks like the mechanical Santa is actually dry-humping one of the reindeer, and that’s really funny if you’re super-high.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca

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