All Lit Up

Armed with twist ties, duct tape and a glut of mindless determination, I teeter at the top of a 24 foot aluminum ladder, a coil of blue rope lights on my left shoulder. I’ve got one glove clenched between my teeth, and I’m leaning over to my right, attempting to thread a twist tie behind the vine that clings to the house. The small limb snaps and I swear at it and then look around for another branch strong enough to support ten pounds of Christmas lights, or a portion of it, at least, without lousing up what the outline of a walrus looks like from 100 feet away. It’s about 30 degrees out, the sun is putting out enough heat to cause the icicles hanging from the gutter over my head to begin to melt. The rhythmic plop plop plop of water on the hood of my coat provides a background accompaniment to my thoughts, which go something like, “If I fall off this ladder and kill myself this will have been so not worth it.”

I shouldn’t be up here at all. This is my husband’s job, darn it. I’m supposed to be on the ground, safe, out of the wind, now gusting at what feels like 50 mph, gazing critically upward as the man of the house positions lights, calling helpful advice to him, like “Over, over, over,” and “Up, up, up.” I keep waiting for the guy next door to notice my efforts and offer to take over for me. It’s what I would do if I were a man, I think to myself. It’s what my husband would do if he were here.

Unfortunately, my husband is working in another state, a warm state, a state that doesn’t get snow in the winter, a state where they decorate palm trees for Christmas and Santa wears tropical colored jams and surfs between chimneys. My husband calls three or four times a week and gives me a weather report so I can be witness to his suffering.

“It was a little chilly, today. Only 72 degrees at lunchtime. I had frost on my windshield this morning, but can you believe it? I left my scraper in Michigan.” “Did you get out a credit card?” “Nah. I just turned on the wipers and it cleared it right off.” That hardly qualifies as frost, I think, and I vow to hit him really really hard when next I see him, probably in January.

With my husband gone for the holidays I’d been toying with the idea of not having Christmas lights at all this year. I came up with plenty of reasons, some of them even good ones, like, it’s just an added expense and we need to be watching our budget more carefully now that we’re two households instead of just one. Or, it’s not like we’ve ever really had Christmas lights on the house, anyway. More like weird lights that just coincidentally got put up around Christmas time. One year my husband drew a Chinese dragon on the house that covered two sides and I worried that the neighbors would think it was a snake and burn us in effigy in the front yard. It’s a fine line to straddle, harmlessly eccentric on one side and dangerously nutso on the other. Most of the time I think we walk it pretty handily, but it’s harder than you’d think to avoid being obviously offensive. Once the kids wanted a rat on the house in lights and I had to nix it.

There are a few ideas that we’ve had that ultimately didn’t make the cut. This year’s included, a “For Sale” sign in script and a family grouping of penguins. I thought the first was too tacky, even for us, and the second was more complicated than I was prepared to attempt.

I tried to avoid the light issue altogether by telling myself that I’d be perfectly happy with just a tree inside the house this year and maybe a small display on the porch. To that end, I painted plywood dinosaurs so that they looked like snow-a-sauruses and outlined them with blue lights. The effect was less than impressive. One friend remarked, “Those are cute whatchmacallits on your porch.” I pulled the plug on them that same night.

Other factors began to weigh on me. The kids had been asking since Thanksgiving what I was planning to put on the house this year. They were feeling pressure from their friends at school. And every time I read the list of lighted houses in the paper I felt guilty that we weren't on it. The final straw was when I got dropped off at my house by Dial A Ride and the driver said, “Oh, you live here? Are you going to put lights up soon? My favorite was the disappearing cat you did a couple years ago.”

So on a recent weekend I screwed up my determination, brought down three bins of lights from the attic and strewed them around the floor. How did my husband do this, anyway? Oh, I remember. First he plugs them all in to see if they work. Then he goes to the store and buys all new ones. This not only makes sense, it also allows me to postpone the actual moment when I have to be outside in the cold by at least an hour. No problem. How long can it possibly take to do three sides of the house? Two hours? Four? I can spare that much time in the name of holiday cheer.

It actually ends up taking three days and my fingers and toes don’t get feeling back in them for another two. Still, the display definitely is up there. I purchased timers, and it’s going on and off regularly. It’s not anything like I thought it would be when I first walked around the house, visualizing where I was going to start and stop the strings of lights and what was possible. The vine itself doesn’t look like anything except a giant black scribble over hundreds of square feet of red bricks, all of it impossibly high off the ground. The final result is three light displays that disturbingly resemble pulsing one celled creatures. Christmas amoebas.

There are other problems. The lights that refuse to light up on the east and north sides of the house are a disappointment, but after thinking about it for negative six seconds I decide I'm not going back up on the ladder because a few recalcitrant bulbs decided it wasn’t their night to shine. My daughter consoles me, “The man in the moon on the front is cute. He looks like he’s winking.” Right. As for the fish on the north side, I’ve decided it’s a classic illustration of the artistic principle of closure. When someone drives by, all they have to do is squint their eyes and shake their heads a little and the lines fill in just fine. Real artists do it all the time.

I send pictures of the lights to my husband via email. “They look great!” he tells me on the phone. “They don’t look anything at all like what I’d do,” a remark which I’ve decided was probably meant to be sincere and complimentary and not truthful and tactless. The important thing is they’re done. The kids are happy and I’m happy and I hope the Dial A Ride driver is happy, too. It’s given me a whole new perspective on husbands and traditions and whether or not having a handy vine on the house from which to hang Christmas lights is the godsend it’s cracked up to be. I don’t think I’ll ever take my husband’s efforts in the decorating department for granted again. And I’m seriously rethinking my plan to transplant the vine to the next house. For one thing, the snow-a-sauruses would definitely be easier to pack.