The Day I Dropped the Bomb

A little while ago, I noticed that our Christmas tree was out of place. For the past few years, we've been using a little four foot "porch tree" as our only Christmas tree. The reasons for this are twofold: 1) it can be placed up on a table away from our children, and 2) we are lazy and a small tree takes far less time to decorate. This year, we have it up on a cabinet in our dining room. It's high enough that Norah can't reach it, and we didn't figure we would have as much trouble with Gabe this year. Last year, we had the tree behind the couch in the living room and, by the end of the season, he wasn't messing with it anymore. We figured he had moved beyond that stage where he had to mess with the ornaments all the time.

Not so.

A couple times this week I've noticed the tree pulled out to the edge of the cabinet, and it's been turned a few times. Gabe has obviously been doing an inventory of the ornaments and pulled the tree out so he could reach more of them. A few times, I've found little, unimportant ones (the ones we purposely put close to the bottom of the tree) lying on the floor, and each time I've picked them up, chewed Gabe out, and hung them back up. After the first few times, I threatened to put the Christmas tree away if he didn't stop.

And it sort of seemed like he had. Until today. When I went over to push the tree back against the wall, I noticed that it seemed kind of thinly decorated. Closer inspection showed that, indeed, more than a dozen ornaments were missing.

I immediately went to the first place that I now look for ANYTHING when it's gone missing in our house, behind the couch to Gabe's little hoard. He is keeping everything back there now. Food, drink cups, trash, toys, books, more trash, vermin, you name it. After pulling out all the blankets and pillows, I quickly spotted a couple of the ornaments. I called him over and told him to find them all for me.

For ten minutes, he found ornaments. Lots of them. Some not in the best of shape anymore, and all of them missing their hooks, which I'm sure will end up in my foot at some point in the not too distant future. He had, apparently, been stockpiling them every time I wasn't paying close enough attention and I just hadn't noticed since not TOO many of them were missing.

The end result. It was quite a collection, and I'm pretty sure there are still several back there.

As he kept pulling them out, I made the ultimate threat. The child threat equivalent of the nuclear option. I built on my previous threat of taking down the tree thusly:

"That's it!" I said. "I'm putting away the Christmas tree, and if we don't have a Christmas tree, then Santa won't know to come to our house. No more Santa! No more Christmas!"

Not surprisingly, Gabe started to cry. He sobbed and bellowed and made some excuse about needing more light to see the ornaments and that was why he took them back there. The kid is improving slightly on his lying skills, but he really needs to work on his concept of plausibility. I let him cry for a little bit and then he promised that he wouldn't take down any more ornaments. I agreed that I wouldn't take the tree down and end Christmas, but if he touched even one more ornament, Christmas was over and all of his presents were going to Finn (in retrospect, that was probably not a good threat as it might make him start to hate Finn--but I know from experience that he doesn't understand the concept of "the less fortunate" so I had to go with something I knew he'd get).

So now we see how well the nuclear option really works. It's been clearly placed on the table, and now I just have to hope that he doesn't force my hand, because I have several presents in here that I really want to open up.