Nick Sinclair began to seriously consider murdering his wife while he was decorating the seventeenth Christmas tree. It was not the seventeenth because he had been decorating the family Christmas tree for seventeen years. No, it was Number Seventeen (according to the label in the storage box) of his wife’s collection of twenty-eight Christmas trees that overran his home every Christmas season.
Home? He snorted as he added six more balls to the already heavily-laden tree that stood on the top step of the sunken living room. This huge house had ceased to be a home long ago. It was nothing more that a showplace, decorated to the nth degree for every holiday known to woman. His wife, to be exact. Noelle began decorating for Christmas the day after Halloween, with barely a nod to Thanksgiving. She said she had to get a head start, since it now took three days to put away the ever-burgeoning Halloween decorations. This year alone, she’d added three headstones and six skeletons to the already-crowded graveyard in front of the house. As he trundled a wheelbarrow piled high with tombstones to the Halloween shed, he imagined how his own grave marker might read: Here lies Nicholas Sinclair, exhausted husband. No, make that “exhausted and exasperated husband.”
It wouldn’t be a problem, he reflected, if all he had to do was shell out the money for Noelle’s extravagance. His ball-bearing factory was extremely successful. He could well afford all the decorations and the sheds that had been built in the back yard to house them. Have at it, he’d told her when she’d added the second and then the third Christmas tree. But somewhere along the way, maybe the seventh or eight tree, she’d enlisted his help. By the twelfth or thirteenth tree, he was doing it all. She stood in the middle of the totes full of ornaments, the strings of lights, and yards of garland marshalling her troops like a general planning an invasion. Except that he was the sole soldier. Whenever he brought up the idea of hiring people to put up all the folderol, she would hear none of it.
“This is something we do together every year. Where’s your Christmas spirit? Are you such a Grinch that you won’t help me put up a few Christmas decorations?”
So, with a heart that his wife was convinced was two sizes two small, Nick continued to haul the trees down from the attic, drag the storage totes in from the sheds, untangle yard of lights he could have sworn he stored neatly the year before, and hang countless ornaments. He climbed ladders to attach stars and angels to the tops of the tallest of the trees and wound garland around banisters, while Noelle fussed with the ribbon bows he could never seem to get right. No matter how many ornaments he put on a tree, she chided him for being stingy and somehow found room for a dozen more.
When Noelle purchased the twentieth tree, Nick had tried to put his foot down. He had literally put his foot down to emphasize his point and broken her favorite glass pickle ornament, the one her great-grandmother brought with her from the Old Country.
“I can’t believe you broke Omi’s pickle!” Noelle was inconsolable. Until Nick brought home the twenty-first Christmas tree as a peace offering, that is. Even so, she brought up the pickle incident every time he objected to the acquisition of a new tree, more lights, or more ornaments. The tree in the kitchen was entirely devoted to Christmas pickles.
Noelle Sinclair in full holiday mode was a force of nature on a scale with Hurricane Katrina. Nick finally resigned himself to the madness. He kept his frustration to himself, even though he longed to grind every last ornament under his heel. In his mind’s eye, he started in the kitchen and once again felt the satisfying crunch of breaking glass under his feet. It remained, however, a hopeless fantasy.
It was the cat that finally tipped the scales of fate.