This time I wouldn’t be caught unprepared again. I ordered every evergreen tree from every large nursery in three states flown in immediately. (No worrying about overordering. Any extras were destined to become bonsai trees.) I had thousands of strips of small cut-out decorations printed. I hired my sister’s whole cheerleading squad to help with the shipping. I was on winter break from school and I’d supervise the shipping myself. This time there’d be no screwup. In the battle between Howard and any shipping Grinch who was planning to steal Christmas from my customers, Howard was going to win.

But even I couldn’t have anticipated the tidal wave of orders. A wave that just kept getting bigger and bigger. In fact, people seemed to think that December 15 wasn’t the final deadline to order. They seemed to think that was the day you had to order. And fully a third of everyone did. Thus, on December 20 as I sat surrounded by sacks of orders, all of which had to be shipped by five p.m. on December 23 to be received by Christmas, I could see I was in trouble.

I called in the reinforcements. Every nerd I ever knew in high school was offered a job. Every cheerleader in the Bronx was summoned. Even people walking down the street were offered jobs. Like a presidential candidate at the end of the campaign, we were going all-out. For the next seventy-two hours, no sleep. This was going to be a marathon. The trees would get there by Christmas.

We lived on McDonald’s and beer. We were exhausted. We were tipsy. We couldn’t think straight. Father Eric kept playing Burl Ives singing Christmas carols on his eight-track to keep our spirits up. Every time “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” came on we all sang along. Everything anyone said appeared hysterically funny and we all kept going into fits of inappropriate laughter. We were working harder than the elves to get the trees out for Christmas. Suddenly the nerds, many of whom had never even been on a date, seemed very attractive and funny to the cheerleaders. This was some pajama party!

Keep packing. Just keep packing trees.

And then, halfway through, disaster struck. Just past two a.m. on the night of December 22, the decorations ran out. These little branches couldn’t support real decorations, and who wanted a tree without decorations? The printers could never make more in time. Father Eric, who at twenty was quite the traditionalist (now, as an established pastor, he’s an outspoken advocate for liturgical changes in the Episcopal Church), suggested we send out traditional decorations. What, I wanted to know, were traditional decorations? Traditional decorations, he told me, were popcorn and cranberries, which people could string on a thread and hang from their tree. They were, he went on, natural. They were inexpensive. Christmas didn’t have to be all commercial and tinsel. It should be traditional.