Sculpin

Last January, my mom handed me a couple of new boxes of inexpensive Christmas ornaments — you know, the iconic shiny ball type. She’d been to the dollar store and bought too many to use, she said. So I carefully packed the boxes away with the other ornaments in a crushproof bin.

Yesterday I brought them out. And when I handled them for the first time, I knew something was amiss. Their reflectivity was wrong. Their weight was wrong. Their temperature was wrong. The hanging hardware was wrong. They had seams, for crying out loud. Good grief, were they plastic? I brought one out to Josh, who was similarly nonplussed. He tapped it lightly on the side of the kitchen sink, then dropped it on the counter. Pretty soon we were playing handball with the ornament and laughing hysterically, whacking that thing into the kitchen floor as hard as we could. We didn’t even scratch it.

On further examination, the boxes did say that the ornaments were plastic. But there were ribbons tied around the boxes that mostly obscured the word “plastic”. Sneaky.

I’m a creature of habit, all right. To my mind, those ornaments have to be glass. They’re supposed to be fragile. You’re supposed to lose at least one every year or so with that characteristic little “pop!” I put them out on the curb with a FREE sign, because they were too weird for me. I hope that somebody with rambunctious kids or dogs gets some use out of them.

If I were a surrealist filmmaker, I’d definitely include an ornament-handball scene, because that tweaks the brain something hard. So, so wrong.

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