Last night I was asked to decorate a kissing ball. I have never seen nor heard of such a thing before in my life. Now, I don’t like doing things that I’ve never tried before, and I absolutely hate doing things that I’ve never done before without a clue as to what the finished product is supposed to do or look like. I was not going to get out of decorating this thing, though.
So there I am. I had this ball of artificial tree branches hanging from a red ribbon loop. I was set in front of a table full of stuff that I could use for decorations. I was given free reign to do as I pleased. And I was left alone to do it.
Okay, I understand the concept of decorating a tree for Christmas. But how the heck do you hang things off of branches sticking out from the bottom of a ball? What was the core of this ball made of? Nothing. There was nothing but branches projecting every which way from that thing. No Styrofoam center that everyone told me should be there for me to pin things to. So no one could tell me what the frig to do.
I tried. Honestly, I tried my best. Pine cones and ribbon bows wouldn’t stay put. Ornaments fell off. Flowers and leaves drooped. I never did figure out how the flower pins were supposed to work to keep things from moving. And I stubbornly refused to learn how to use a hot glue gun to do a project that I had no interest in completing in the first place. I finally just tied stuff to miscellaneous branches and called it done.
This should be a funny story, but it’s not. Not to me anyway. I burst into tears twice during the process. Thought about storming out of the house. Decided privately to spend Christmas alone next year. Went to bed early because I felt physically exhausted. All over a dumb ball of artificial tree branches that someone else decided that I should decorate.
I hate clinical depression.