A Clark Griswold Style Attack

Okay, it's not a scene that will get me a nomination for father of the year, and I'm not proud of it, but Francine and I couldn't help busting a gut when at dinner time I described how the spiral white light Christmas tree ended up in many broken pieces yesterday afternoon. Last night when watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation for the thousandth time, Francine couldn't help pointing out how similar my reaction to a Christmas display gone bad is to Clark Griswold's.

Alexander and I were working in the front yard, diligently setting up a snowman, Christmas tree and attempting to add the spiral tree to the mix.

But I kept running into issue after issue trying to get the spiral tree set up. It wasn't fitting together properly, wasn't standing the way it should, and for the life of me, I couldn't get the top of the tree and star properly in place.

After about 40 minutes of repeatedly fiddling with it, my frozen, numb fingers ended up pushing too hard trying to get the star lodged into to the top section of the tree and snapped the top section into two pieces.

Completely at the end of my rope, I kicked the remaining part of the tree over then proceeded to repeatedly hammer blows down onto the tree, letting out a barbarian-like battle cry.


After releasing a bit of pent-up frustration, I looked over at my poor dear four year old who was standing in the garage looking at the scene and crying uncontrollably. "My tree!" he sobbed. "My spiral Christmas tree!"

Bad enough that the tree broke -- but poor Alexander had to watch Daddio pitch a Clark Griswold style fit on the broken tree.

Despite my antics, this story DOES have a happy ending.

Alexander's tears were quickly dried, his heart was consoled and the broken pieces of the spiral Christmas tree were laid to rest in the garbage can. Another one of my "not so fine" moments of fatherhood was over.

This morning, I made a quick trip to Canadian Tire where I purchased not one but three miniature spiral Christmas trees for my son. I surprised him by setting them up in the kitchen while he was playing downstairs. He was completely delighted.

I figured it was the least I could do after subjecting him to the horrific scene he had to endure the day before.

Only ten more days until Christmas Eve -- let's see how many more Clark Griswold style goofs I can pull off . . .