Lifestyle Advice for Idiots

It’s that time of year when we gather together with friends and family and hunker down in our collective warmths to share the company of those we somehow can’t manage to spend enough time with throughout the year.

It’s also the time of year when you can’t pick up a newspaper or magazine or surf the web without some “lifestyle” expert offering you the most inane, patronizing family-entertaining-slash-home decorating advice you’ve ever read.

“Hosting a Crowd at Christmas? Find Creative Solutions,” trumpets an article in the Sunday Herald. Its solution for your dining-room deficiency? Expand your tabletop by placing a big round hunk of plywood on top, then delicately disguise it with a floor-length tablecloth and a whimsical sash! Extra added bonus tip from me: Just remember to remind your guests not to lean on the edge of said “table,” unless you want Uncle Jack’s mashed potatoes in Auntie Joan’s lap. Or unless you drill some giant bore-holes through your existing table and bolt your massive plywood topper down.

That same article offers even more creative options for the inevitable shortage of seating you’ll encounter over the holidays: buy eight “inexpensive” wooden folding chairs (I went looking - only $48.98 each at foldingchairsandtables.com, or $17.50 each on eBay). Then – get this – they want you to spray-paint them, four red and four silver, for “holiday seating with flair!” Oh, you’ve got that kind of time. And this is the best part: come Thanksgiving you can simply re-paint them all amber and gold! Our creative advisors counsel: “For the cost of a few cans of paint, you can change the colour scheme throughout the year.” Of course you can! Don’t get all bogged down with, you know, paying the bills and getting the groceries and looking after the family. You’ll find the time. Go big or go home.

Then I came across another article with this little gem of advice: buy a living “balled and burlapped” Christmas tree! “Haul it home,” they said. “Decorate it, stack presents beneath it, celebrate around it and then — rather than drag it to the curb with the discarded wrapping paper — place it into a hole in the yard and enjoy it as part of the landscape for many holidays to come.”

Place it into a hole in the yard. You know, the hole that you’ll magically dig into the frozen ground under the three feet of snow in your yard in the dead of winter. That hole.

And the final bit of holiday lifestyle advice that set me off this week?

“Turn your holiday gift-wrapping into a social occasion. Collect all of your wrapping supplies this week, but then put them aside.

“A couple of days before the holiday, get together with your sister who lives out of town but who’s home for the holidays, make a couple of cups of tea, put on some music, and wrap, wrap, wrap.”

Doesn’t that sound like fun, girls? Wrap, wrap, wrap. Drink tea! Listen to music! What could be funner? Maybe we can get one of Santa’s elves to drop by.

I just can’t handle any more ill-thought advice for those of us with so little imagination that we couldn’t possibly figure what to do with ourselves over the holidays. Maybe the authors get a kick out of seeing whether anyone actually tries to take their ridiculous suggestions.

Anyway, I’m just gonna hold off a little on the chair-painting, table-topping, and tree-planting. The gifts, well, I guess they do have to be wrapped. But I have my own little holiday ritual – 3 am, in a panic, on Christmas eve. Now that’s a special occasion.