On theme trees and legitimate paranoia

While it is true that they treated John like garbage, one thing the Pattersons do tend to agree about is that having a great big turkey that's pretty much guaranteed to either be turned into weeks worth of casseroles or shoved into the freezer for years to come is just part of the holiday. Well, at least Elly does. Then again, she does like to hoard old Christmas ornaments, old wrapping paper and a host of other things that John would love to throw out in the firm belief that if she didn't have them, people would start screaming that she'd somehow ruined Christmas by trying to change things.

The odd thing about this is that she just might be right. Since the theme of the strip seems to be that Elly can never really win anything, her complaint that people only notice what she does when she either can't or won't do it has a certain amount of validity. Take, as a for instance, the time she wanted to put up a theme tree back in 1998. The way they acted, you'd have assumed that she wanted to cook Rudolph or something. Given that the one time she actually tried pulling the stick out of her arse, she was told to put it back in so she could match the rest of the family, it's not hard to see that we're dealing with a clan of inflexible idiots who fear change.