Having himself a merry little . . . disaster

The whole trip was only supposed to take five minutes, 10 minutes tops.

All he had to do was drive to the grocery store and pick a few items off of the list; egg nog, brown sugar, cranberry sauce and some cinnamon.

No problem, he thought. But that was before he got on the main road. It was raining and the sky was rather dark and gloomy. To top it off, a police car had two cars pulled over and all of the other cars just had to have a look. Once past the traffic stop, several other drivers refused to resume top speed, afraid that the police officer would jump in his car and pursue them, too.

Eventually, he made it to the grocery store and, of course, the aisles were packed with shoppers filling their carts to make Christmas treats. He searched for the items high and low, wondering which type of egg nog, what kind of brown sugar, what type of cinnamon, stick or ground, and how much he should spend on cranberry sauce. His cellphone was at home charging its battery.

Once he had the items in his now-heavy shopping basket, he hopped in a self-checkout line, believing that with a set number of items required to be in the line and possessing only four items himself, things should move quickly.

He, of course, was wrong. He chose the side with a technophobic elderly woman, who appeared afraid that the laser scanner would damage her skin if it touched her and her eyes if she looked at it. This meant that the label was often in the wrong place to be read. Somehow she completed scanning her items and then asked the monitor if she could pay by check. After what felt like a decade, the old lady was through and it was his turn to scan and pay.

He moved rapidly with the ease of an old pro at scanning grocery items, until the egg nog opened and spilled all over the scanner. He could hear people in the line groan behind him and the teenage supervisor of the scan and pay section let out an audible sigh as she wiped down the scanner with a wet rag before calling for someone to pick up a quart of Happy Valley Christmas Egg Nog.

With close to an hour having passed since he left on this journey and with a sticky hand smelling like egg nog, he drove back to the house with his mission complete, only stopping for the five stop lights in between the store and his home. He unloaded the items on the kitchen counter and moved into the living room to sit by the Christmas tree and help decorate it.

The trimming went swimmingly until his wife called from the kitchen. Apparently, the cinnamon wasn’t in the correct form, nor was the brown sugar, and the egg nog was too small. Pre-spill, he had chosen correctly but the teen supervisor called out the wrong size, confusing a quart with a gallon, and he had been too embarrassed by his delay and distracted with the mess to correct her.

Getting up quickly from the couch and grinding his teeth so that he wouldn’t ruin the holidays with a profanity-laced tirade, he began to move towards the coat rack.

Unfortunately, his shoe lace caught a stray tangle of Christmas lights that had pooled by the couch. He pulled to get his foot loose and ended up taking the tree with him, sending the tree, its ornaments, many of which were breakable and therefore sharp after shattering, crashing to the ground.

He tried to get up gingerly and avoid placing his hand on a mound of shiny colored glass but this did not work. In fact, he was also punctured by the hooks that the shiny, fragile, colored and sharp ornaments are hung by.

With the water from the tree tray soaking his shoes, socks and pant cuffs and blood dripping from his fingers and palms, he got up and grabbed the keys to his car.

He sat in the driveway for several minutes, using a collection of fast food napkins to make a makeshift tourniquet and to stop the flow of blood.

He turned on the car and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” came on the radio. He got a few stinging tears in his eyes as he glanced through the front window at his wife, picking the tree back up and then sweeping the collection of pine needles, glass and water up.

This will be the best Christmas ever, he thought to himself, because barring a few cuts that likely wouldn’t give him an infection, he had his health and though his wife’s requests could often drive him crazy, she was his family and he loved her. They had shelter and food and gifts under the tree that wouldn’t be damaged by a little puddle of water.

He shut his car off and ran in the house for his cellphone and a change of his shoes and socks before starting a journey that would only last five minutes, 10 minutes tops.