The Man Who Hated Christmas

Every once and a while I stumble upon a fun read in the "local paper" and usually it's a Tommy Tomlinson story. Another source for a good read is Ken Burger of Charleston's Post and Courier. But when all else fails this southerner turns to of all things the New York Times.


Beal's Island Maine Lobster Pot Christmas Tree which has nothing to do with the story Cedar just thought it was a cool pic.

And so it goes with "The Man Who Hated Christmas:

BOB liked to say how much he hated Christmas. This amazed me and my sister. We’d look at each other: How could anyone hate Christmas? But he’d say it again and again: “Bess, I hate Christmas.” He had a variation on this: “Bess, I hate Christmas trees.” He’d shake his head thoughtfully and chuckle: “They’re nothing but trouble. You struggle with them and fight over them and then they die and drop needles everywhere and you have to drag them out on the street.”

He usually said this while my sister, my mother and I struggled and fought over the tree in our living room, trying to get it to stand up straight on the round wooden table next to the television set. Sagging and dust-covered cardboard boxes of waiting ornaments, just retrieved from the basement, would crowd the floor around us. Radiators would hiss. A football game would be on the television, which was old and tinted everything blue, and was watched by Bob and no one else.

“Bob, is it straight? Can you look for just a moment?” my mother — the aforementioned Bess, or Bessie — would ask him in a voice edged with increasing irritation. She held the top of the tree, leaning; I was beneath it, grasping the trunk, the lower branches scraping my scalp.

Bob would look up, make a visible show of being aggrieved at the interruption, squint and tell us no — a bit more to the right, or a bit more to the left. We’d all struggle and fight some more until we got it straight. He’d go back to his game.

Read the rest of "The Man Who Hated Christmas" by Wendell Jamieson, an editor at The New York Times, who is also the author of “Father Knows Less” (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2007.) here.