Light It Up

As I said, always a strange season for me. But then again, all the seasons are strange, this one is always crazy busy. If I'd known how much busier I'd get throwing kids into the equation for this holiday season... Well, I wouldn't have changed a damn thing, but I might have paused and reflected for something like 10 more minutes.

I fulfilled my family duties last Sunday and actually got on a borrowed 20' ladder and stuck lights on my house. Yes, I know, hard to believe. I've been trying to talk my family out of wanting them for years with arguments like, "Do you want our house to end up looking like the house across the street?" (which turned out to be rather poor, as it's got every Christmas decoration available strewn across it and thus is a child's dream) and "Do you know what it costs to run those little lights for a month (poor argument, too as I have no idea, either. It could cost a nickel).

Hard to believe Ryan, a 9-year old boy, and I actually pulled the whole thing off. We went to the requisite Big Box Hardware store and stood for those stunned few minutes while surrounded by the myriad of lights (or myriad lights, if you prefer) only the Big Box Stores can offer.

Well, except of course, the ones I wanted. The white mini lights with the white cord.

But we were here. And, apparently, few other people in the aisle. Which as we all know from past holiday shopping experiences, is a good thing.

A guy started talking to me when I was looking for the white lights - telling me he hadn't had to put lights up for years, since his divorce, and now that he and his fiance were living together here he was back buying decorations.

You know, I never divulge stuff like that on aisle 23, or any aisle in department stores. In fact, it took me a long time to tell my therapist I wanted to leave my girlfriend.

Regardless, this was a really nice guy, and it turned out, a heck of a source of information on Christmas lights. He knew stuff about lengths, timers, cords, all that stuff and really sounded down-to-earth about it. Before I hear you complain, "How could he NOT sound down-to-earth, they're Christmas lights", I'd like to remind you Martha Stewart bought 7 large houses explaining to us a variety of things that we should know and that should be easy, things like pie crusts. So hearing someone say, "Ah, they say 3 sets, but really 4 won't matter much if you string them together", was really reassuring.

I hoped for the best with this guy's new fiancee. I mean, he started giving advice to the woman behind me. When I went to go check out the LED lights, I got advice from that woman, too (was it his advice passed on or her own advice? At this point I didn't care. I needed everything I could to get me up that 20 foot ladder.)

We bought under $50 worth of lights and said No to the animated deer that pretends to eat your flowers (which is funny, I'm guessing, only if you don't have real deer eating your begonias on a regular basis).

I explained to Ryan the plan and, if you can believe it, he was really good about the whole thing. He got down off the roof when I told him to, he reached over the side and did not slide down the saltillo tiles onto the sidewalk, really it was a banner day. We did have problems with him wiggling the ladder for some reason while I was 18 feet up and (I felt) really close to crashing through our plate glass front window.

When Wendy came home, she was more than surprised - she let out a, "Gorgeous".

Now this is a woman who never lets out that sort of sentiment and we'd done it, we'd moved her with miniature Christmas lights hung all across our Spanish style 1927 casa, which is a beautiful thing.

I'm going to try to hold that moment close as long as I can.

For I know when January 7th comes, I'm going to back on that roof with the shaky ladder.