The other day I hauled up all of the Christmas stuff from storage. The tree, the lights, the stockings to hang by the chimney with care, the towels, sheets, dodads, dingle dangles, bits and bobs. All of it. I probably looked to the neighbors like one of the Magi’s sweaty camels piled to the brim with shiny treasures. I like Christmas as much as any other person, but I do not like hauling stuff up the stairs just to haul it back down in a month. I really want to like decorating for the holidays. I want to look at ornaments and remember good times past but I just see work. Sweat. Despair. And the place where I see the most work is in a huge red plastic container with a green lid that has to weigh seventy pounds.
In this container lies a small fortune of Christmas lights that we have collected over the years. Some of them work, some of them don’t. I don’t know which one is which because when it’s time to take the things down I pull one end as hard as I can and pray I don’t get my eye plucked out from the shrapnel of staples and plastic pegs that held them up. Then I smash them back in the container and haul them back to their crypt for another year.
I should back up. That is how it used to go with the lights. Last year one of the strands of our white bulbs were on their last legs, so mid-season I had to go and buy another strand. I went to the store but they didn’t have the same brand. They only had LED bulbs, not the older incandescent ones we owned. When I get home and replaced them they were not the same color temperature as the other bulbs. Color temperature? I have a master’s degree in painting and I had no idea light had temperatures.
Needless to say, the moment I came to the realization they were different I knew I was in trouble. I showed them to my wife and she spotted them immediately. “Are they different colors? They don’t twinkle.” “They look the same to me.” But she knew I was lying. She can tell without me saying anything. So instead of having an off-color light strand, all the lights in that part of the house had to go. It was then decided by royal decree that the next year (this year) we would have matching lights. That is how I found myself out of bed at 6am the morning after Christmas to buy discount lights. And boy did we get a bunch of them. Brand new. Super bright. All LED. All the same brand. All the same temperature. We threw away the other lights. Put the new lights in the red container and off they went to the crypt to rest up for their big debut.
Part of the agreement of getting new lights is that our light display this year would be better than years past. Traditionally I have only hung lights on our garage and front porch area. I am told this makes the house “unbalanced”. I have never attempted to hang them on our main roof because it is high and I’m deathly scared of heights. When I opened the red container this year and saw all of those brand new boxes I had every intention of climbing up my giant, cast iron, ladder and hanging these lights but when faced with reality, I chickened out. My wife, who has no fear of heights, climbed the ladder and successfully got a strand started, but when it was time to move the ladder I vetoed the entire thing because I couldn’t have her die before Christmas (nobody else buys me presents). Annoyed at my apprehension she told me, “Fine. You do it or hire someone, but they better get up there somehow.”
Basically, I had a choice of certain death with any decision other than hiring someone so I took a gamble and posted a help ad to an online yard sale. Within minutes I get a ‘ding’ on my phone and some young fellow said he would help me. I called him up and he said that he’d be over in a few minutes. Then I get another ding on my phone from someone warning me about this person. They said he was a scam artist. Then another ding and another person telling me this. I didn’t know what to do, the guy was en route. I couldn’t cancel but I didn’t want to get killed over Christmas lights. It seemed like that was my only option.
The guy shows up in a very nice looking car. Seemed like a nice enough fella, but in the back of my head, I was preparing for him to tackle me. I told him what I needed. He grabbed my ladder. Grabbed my lights. Got right to work. Then I thought, maybe he’s going to fall off the roof on purpose and then I’ll be in some horrible lawsuit with “The Strong Arm” or “The Law Hammer”. But it never happened. It was a true Christmas miracle. The guy did the work. Got paid. Left. And to my knowledge didn’t steal anything.
That night I got my wife and son and we stood in the driveway for a classic Clark Griswold moment as I went to plug in the lights. That is when I realized I never checked the new lights before I plugged them in. I said a little prayer. Luckily they worked. But as I scanned over all of my hard work I felt a certain chill in the air. My wife looks at me “the ones on the top are not the same temperature as the ones on the bottom. They don’t twinkle. Turn them off.”
Looking forward to next year.