Tis the Season

I have come to hate my Christmas lights. I have gotten my “dancing Christmas shrubs” working quite nicely, although there are a few strings of light that only light half way, and that drives me berserk. The lights that really give me fits are the ones that go high up on our highest gutters. I am incapable of putting those things up without muttering some very un-Christmaslike words in the process.

Yesterday afternoon was slightly less frigid than recent days, so I thought I’d attempt to get those things into place. I spent a good hour and a half messing with them, and I’m no closer to having them up than I was beforehand. I’m not sure what prompts me to torture myself with these things every year in the first place. I highly doubt that there’s a passage in the Bible that says, “And thou shalt illunateith thine dwelling with thy brightest of twinkle lights,” or whatever.

Anyway, before attempting to string them up on the house, I plugged them in to see if they’d light properly. And only about half of the lights were working. This was actually not such bad news since the lights usually work 100% well when I first test them. They typically wait until I’ve gone through the endless struggle of putting them on the house, and then they’ll fail miserably. So I headed off to the hardware store to buy some more of the stupid things. It really is a good thing that the hardware store is pretty close to home, given the number of trips I make down there this time of year.

I picked up some replacement strings of light, and started working on getting them in place. I don’t have access to a ladder high enough to reach our highest gutter, so I use the ladder I do have, along with my special Holiday Extendable Stick (get your mind out of the gutter; it’s a stick designed to reach Christmas lights into place, not whatever perverted thing you’re thinking), to put those little plastic doo-dads into place. Then I use the stick to drape the lights over the plastic things until the lights stretch the length of the front of the house.

This is where the nasty, non-Christmas words come into play. Invariably, when I try to attach the strand of lights to the first plastic thing, it’s always too heavy and winds up pulling the plastic thing down, along with all of the lights. In the true holiday spirit, I’ll scream non-Christmas words as I thrust the stick directly into the ground like a spear. Fa la la la la.

When we first bought the house, I used to worry that while I was adding lights I’d fall from the ladder or electrocute myself on the nearby power lines. Now I’m not worried about that at all. In fact, sometimes I root for electrocution or a fall from the ladder because that would give me a great excuse for saying the heck with the doggone lights.

So the whole mess is still sitting out there with the lights bunched up on the ground and the ladder waiting for me in the garage. And the Holiday Stick is stabbed into the permafrost of our yard. I can barely wait to continue the process.