Lame duck

The cherry sellers are back!

Sedans are parking in their usual side-of-street spots all over suburban Wellington, with students popping open the boots for the day, setting up their trestles and cheerful CHERRIES signs, arranging brown paper bags of Marlborough’s finest (“These were picked yesterday,”), and settling in the shade with a book (our local seller finished The Secret History by Donna Tartt one Christmas; she said it was pretty good). Now and again, they interrupt their reading to bounce upright and sell a box here and a bag there to passing drivers, who stop on impulse and drive away pleased with themselves.

I would’ve adored a job like that when I was a student. Everybody loves a cherry; everybody loves what a cherry signifies. Everyone is cheerful, and you get to read between sales. The job ends on Christmas Eve. The challenges would be operating the EFTPOS machine in an unstable Wi-Fi area, and cycle lanes, because you can’t sell stone fruit in a cycle lane. Not under this council.

Anyway, this can mean only one thing: summer has arrived! Christmas is three weeks away! And I remain disorganized!

By this I mean, none of my mental plans have materialized. For example, every year I expect to update our sorrowful decorations. I plan to make a version of a garland I saw once in one of those upmarket homewares shops which trade in the French Country aesthetic (distressed-looking cabinets, trugs full of pinecones, and white enamel jugs. So many jugs). This garland was simply a long string of dried bay leaves, pinned to a mantelpiece. No baubles, no fandangles. Just dead vegetable material.

If you’re a minimalist French person living in the country, I guess threading hundreds of fucked leaves on a length of waxed string is as far as you’re prepared to go. It was frugal; it was stylish; it totally lacked humour, and I wanted one. We happen to have a bay tree, so all I needed was a large embroidery needle and twenty spare hours.

Naturally, I haven’t started this Christmas craft project. But it circulates in my head, every year, using up valuable brainpower.

The disappointment continues when I dig out the tree and its ornaments from under the stairs every year. We’ll be putting it up this afternoon, now it’s December, and alongside the lovely wooden decorations gifted by my mother and the odd sentimental one (stitched felt hearts I made when the children were tiny; a white dove of remembrance for Dad), there’s some appalling old tat with no backstory that I never seem to replace. Though I mean to.

Take, for example, my dodgy plastic Kmart wreath (just a plain one, imitating pine branches). You don’t ever hang one of these outside - they’re too cheap. One year I did this and after a couple of rainy nights, woke up to it sliding down the gate in a bubbly kind of slime.

One year, and I don’t actually remember doing this so I must have been cracked out on mothering infants, I threaded half a dozen fake roses to it and added a string of tiny lights. Then I hooked it to a hallway mirror and sadly, this has now become an annual feature of our household. The mirror would seem bare in December without it.

It looks exactly as you’d expect it to look. Cheap and demented, referencing nothing, except maybe a wild weekend drinking cider at a folk music festival. The string lights are so old now that the battery pack has corroded. The lights are feeble and the roses, surely made of melted bottles and asbestos, are about as festive as a whirring plastic sunflower in a graveyard.

Then there’s the plug-in EziBuy garland I hang each year on the stairs. It was a pretty good buy, actually, but the lazy part is that I fix it with those nasty stick-on white plastic hooks people use to organize things inside cupboards. They are ugly and eye-catching. For three weeks the garland hides them, but the rest of the year the hooks stay stuck to the banister - our lovely, caramel, historic wooden banister. It’s partly that I can’t be bothered removing them and partly that if I do, I’ll break off bits of 100-year-old staircase.

They are a reproach to my housekeeping.

Don’t get me started on our hairless tinsel, the reindeer in the window (WELCOME!), the Pōhutukawa tablecloth, and the duck jug.

Oh, did I mention the duck jug? Okay, in the disorganization stakes, my husband takes the cookie. Mind you, he wouldn’t consider himself a chaotic shopper. He just assigns Christmas shopping the attention it deserves. He thinks about it at the time, while he is doing it, and not one minute before.

Unlike the rest of us who might panic-shop on Christmas Eve, he’s enviably casual about the whole thing. He leaves it until the last minute because the last few minutes are still minutes: potable, as time. He’s got this. It’s annoying as hell, knowing someone as low-key about Christmas as he is. And he usually nails it, which is irritating to someone like me, who has been having a cow about Christmas since October 31.

I don’t offer him my Christmas wish list as a guide to his shopping because I’m too disorganized to make one, so this particular year he was freebasing. Is that the word? Or do I mean freeballing? Rawdogging? What I’m getting at, is, he was shopping for me with seconds to spare on the clock, on PURE IMPULSE.

When’s the last time you did anything purely on impulse? I haven’t done anything without regard to the consequences since the late nineties. It must have felt AMAZING.

Anyway, there he was on level two of the now departed Kirkcaldie & Stains department store. He was in the section where Royal Doulton gave way to Waterford crystal. Nobody in their right mind ever spent time in this department because it was basically ten square feet of eye-wateringly expensive toffware - think the kind of china plates the Mitford sisters might serve cakes from, in the event Adolf Hitler came for afternoon tea.

I can just imagine him tooling around in there, humming, with the pianist tinkling away on Level One (Yes! An actual pianist. There was a sweet-natured doorman in a top-hat, too. With the passing of Kirkcaldie & Stains, there also died the charm of shopping at Christmas. Good luck finding warm cheer on Lambton Quay today. The old Kirks is now an AS Colour, and I don’t think they do little trains in their Christmas windows).

At some point my husband’s eye must have fallen on this glass jug with a silver-plated pouring spout shaped like a duck’s head. Perhaps it would be more correct to call it a mallard. The duck had a stippled look, a dumpy rear end, and cold eyes. It was an empty vessel. Yep, decided my husband, thinking of me. Job done.

When I unwrapped it on Christmas morning, my disbelief was total. I hadn’t seen this coming. When he told me where he’d bought it, I knew this jug must have cost over $200. You couldn’t get anything for $200 on Level 2 of Kirk’s, unless it was a pen. I think my eyes might have prickled at this point.

The duck did what a good Christmas present should do; it made me reexamine the choices that had brought me here, to this suburb, to this aesthetic (damned French Country, although the French are more into cocks than ducks). Socks don’t do this. A Terry’s Chocolate Orange doesn’t either. A jug in the shape of a waterfowl, does. Your life will flash before your eyes. Who am I? you might think. And who does the guy I married think I am?

I imagine we filled it with Prosecco that first year and poured the glasses with a flourish. After Christmas the duck went into the glass-fronted dresser with the other quirky things, and spent most of the year staring hard at us as we ate dinner.

The year, as they do, brought us things and took things away. A fish; guinea pigs; a cat; a dog. Visitors; grandparents; friends. The kids advanced from juniors to intermediates, their legs getting longer and their language, if they were George, becoming fruitier.

As Christmas rolled around again, we counted our blessings, even when these were few. Dad died a few days before Christmas one year. There’s a photo of me with the kids by the fireplace, setting out a pie and a carrot for Santa and Rudolph and even though I’m smiling, I look glazed. I was in shock, but Christmas doesn’t respect your feelings. It canters on, jingling its bells. We put a white dove on the tree and switched on the lights as always.

For months the duck watched over dinners of all kinds - the ones that hit the sweet spot (pasta with meat sauce, Mexican chicken) and those that didn’t (tacos. I mean, who in the world doesn’t like tacos?). Dinners set for three, four, five. Lively dinners and tired ones. Dinners interrupted by George, leaping up to act out a scene; meals disrupted by the dog, nosing for food; ruined by charity collectors knocking at the door or cut short by evening activities (Ping Pong Club! Playwriting class!). Halloween parties. Birthday parties. We kept forgetting to invite the duck, though once or twice filled it with Coke and passed it around.

Something was changing in my relationship with the duck. He was growing on me. He was pointless, he was a bit tasteless, he was becoming sort of precious for being so useless. He was part of family lore.

He was something my husband knew I’d wind up liking, even though he wasn’t something I would’ve asked for and had in fact left me speechless when I took it out of the box. The duck made me appreciate my husband’s appreciation for me. Maybe I could relax after all, forget all the pressure, and enjoy the moment I’m in. Even the last minutes, as inevitably we run down the clock. Even those ones count.

Job done, thought the duck.