Someone brought the resin fox into work without asking. It was fist-sized, shiny, sat half-doglike with its tail wound around its feet like it had been interrupted mid howl and they shoved it on the shelf next to the kettle. There were complaints and sudden passionate speeches about office policy and someone got so mad that we had a proper argument about a fox that ran on for the best part of a week. Half of it was about aesthetics. The other half was more resentment, feeling like maybe we’d been betrayed because apparently we’d had an unwritten standing agreement that this was a “no ornaments near the mugs” household, office, whatever books we collectively are; but nobody can remember when or why we decided that either.
The argument against the fox basically came down to it doing nothing. It didn’t hold your screws, didn’t light up, wasn’t even a bottle opener like the resin otter Gary’s aunt bought them had been one Christmas.
It sat there gathering dust and being stared at and… yeah, fine.
Some people think ornaments are purely about that, existing solely to be looked at, but other people find that the exact problem with ornaments.
That’s the divide, see, and it’s always been there.
Long before fox existed. Some of us like ornaments despite or even because they’re utterly useless. No maintenance or batteries, no beads to fluff. Doesn’t do anything but exist, but exist right there next to your knickers where it’ll catch your eye every time you open the cupboard and make you feel something, however stupid or pointless or fleeting, for two seconds before you shut the door and never think about it again.
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And that’s apparently acceptable to some people.
Others of us feel like that’s pretentious bullshit and the minute you have more than about five starting to crowd a shelf it looks like your local gift shop got shuffled off this mortal coil and we’d rather three well-chosen pieces than fourteen basically highway robbery prices full of baubles that gather that dumb specific dust ornament places get.
You know the one. It’s never quite the same dust as anything else in the room.
The fox remains here still, I suppose, winner, though one of us still relocates it to the far back of the shelf whenever they do a bit of tidying (they swear blind it was them that bought it) and another one shifts it back again within the hour. Nobody’s won, exactly. It fell off the shelf once and survived with just a chip in one ear, which endeared it to everyone despite itself rather than ruined it. Like a scuffed shoe can look better than a new one if you love it enough.
We can agree that if you’re going to force someone to look at a resin ornament on a daily basis it should bloody well earn that scrutiny instead of letting you dust it around the room; that a well-chosen one has a personality, in its face or its posture that reaches in and grabs you on even the most boring Tuesday; and that bad ones just sit there remaining shiny and unmemorable which is embarrassing failure of its own that nobody will admit was likely refunded rather than paid full price for. We can’t agree on how many ornaments are too many for the shelf. We can’t agree on the fox. We’ll probably argue about it forever and honestly we enjoy the arguments more than the fox itself was.
