Christmas - In A Box

I am a reasonable man. Really I am. Some might, at a push, describe me as someone who is reasonably in tune with women. I know that the best cure for a broken heart is chocolate. I know accessories matter. I am not insensitive to these things. Yet, having spent another evening in a stifling hot loft trying to pack up boxes and mark them with whether they will be needed in the next three years or not, I found myself truly stumped by a conversation I had with my wife:


Wife – What are you doing with those Christmas Decorations?

Me - I am putting them all into one box.

Wife – They don’t go in one box.

Me - They haven’t in the past, no, but we are trying to minimise the amount of boxes we have.

Wife – The decorations are different colours and we rotate them. They need to be in different boxes so they don’t get muddled up.

Me - Surely if the decorations are different colours, it will be easy to identify which ones go with which colour scheme?

Wife – If they are in the same box we might be tempted to use them together and mess up the scheme.

Me – But you decorate the tree, and you won’t be tempted to use the two colour schemes together so there wont be a problem…

Wife – They go in different boxes…

Me – We also appear to have six sets of Christmas fairy lights; which ones do you want to keep?


Dear reader, I am sure you can imagine how the rest of the conversation went. It seems in two areas my wife is obsessional – Christmas tree decorations (with the attached insistence on a real tree that will drop pine needles around the entire house by magic - I swear I found one on top of a wardrobe last week!) and wrapping presents. I am certain that my wife spends more money each year on wrapping paper than I do on gifts. It’s my brothers birthday – I will get him a bottle of wine, on the way to his flat, three weeks after his birthday. My wife’s sister’s birthday will involve a three month scouring of the shops followed by a further two weeks searching for suitable wrapping paper, followed by an afternoon of careful wrapping and tying of bows.

Really, I try to understand, but I struggle; the wrapping doesn’t matter, surely it doesn’t...

As I write that line for a moment my mind drifts to (avert your eyes, bashful reader) my wife’s lingerie, and some of the, quite frankly, stunning “wrappings” she has covered herself in…hmmm…okay I can see that the wrapping can be worthwhile, I will let that one slide for now…but surely the Christmas tree decorations thing is a sign of mental instability?

Yours as ever,

The Broken Man