Mum Madness

Some days, I wonder just what planet I live on, but then I realize that it's just Texas. My latest foray into the unknown culture of this place began with a late-night quest for the mythical Homecoming Mum. Of course, all of the local grocery stores and Walgreens were already depleted of their allotted beribboned adornments, so I had no choice but to wait for Hobby Lobby to open the next day.

There, I was greeted by a meager assortment of baubles and bells, as well as the bases for this traditional item. I thought I had struck the jackpot when I found a pre-made one for the low, low price of...(insert choking sound here)... $45! I beat feet to Michael's, thinking that surely they would be cheaper there.

Oh, but I would be wrong. I did find a nicer pre-made one for $50, and one that was even cooler for $99, but I couldn't wrap my head around the concept of paying someone else to glue-gun and staple loads of ribbon, crappy-do ornaments, and curled ribbons onto what can only be described as an overly festooned rosette.

In fact, the last time I had seen a rosette like that was when I won Grand Champion Swine Showperson as a Senior in my own High School back in Kansas! So, why were we now pinning these things on all of the girls on their respective Homecoming weekends?

Apparently, because the bigger the Mum, the more you are loved.

And because Texans like everything big, these things have taken on ridiculous proportions. In fact, I was given an important piece of advice...put a necklace on it so it doesn't rip the girl's clothing. Yep, they're that big.

And it's not just for the girls. The boys have their own, albeit smaller, sized mum to wear on their arms. Garter belts...on steroids. Hopefully that's the only thing that's on steroids, because, after all, this is Texas and they like their football players big.

Because I'm a crafty gal when I want to be, I plunked down my $43 and took my booty home to create what I thought would be the ugliest, most gaudy piece of fluff imaginable...in other words, perfect. A surprising thing happened while wielding this glue gun, though...I began to swear like a sailor! Granted, this isn't a side of me that I like very much, and have successfully kept it under wraps for over 20 years, but this tradition is so overtly biased that I found myself struggling to not through the entire thing in the trash.

I'm all for traditions. I just find that spending upwards of $200 on an overgrown chrysanthemum is rather egregious.

I'm also very grateful that I didn't grow up with this particular tradition. As the youngest of 8 in a poor farming family, we didn't have extra money to lavish on many extras. Granted, I probably would have worked extra hours in the summer laboring in the fields to save enough to get whatever I could in order to "fit in". I did just that for many other reasons that today, seem quite trivial if I remember them at all.

It finally dawned on me that the reason for my profanity wasn't because it was hard, or because we couldn't afford it. It was because I kept thinking of all of the other girls who wouldn't be getting one. You see, I would have been one of the mum-less. I was never part of the "in crowd", which was even more exclusive in the 62-person high school of my youth.

After the contraption became a legitimate work of Texas art, I began to wonder at the stress I had just put on myself. A big part of it was because I didn't want to disappoint my son, who was really excited to give it to his girlfriend. Anytime he wants to involve me in his life, I'm there, so because this was important to him, it was important to me. The other huge piece was the sheer hypocracy of it all. After all, I constantly espouse the concept that we are all one, that what happens to a part affects the whole, and that everyone has a value that is beyond measure. Yet here I was, curling golden ribbon into ringlets so this mum would have enough bling to blind Stevie Wonder again.

I guess that goes to show you that even an enlightened individual (most of the time, anyway) gets caught up in the fever pitch of the masses, especially if it involves your children.