After several false starts I’ve finally gotten the string of lights hanging along the roof of the porch.
Unfortunately, they are hanging down vertically, not across horizontally.
I’d give up, but I can’t even give up until I climb back up the stepladder and get them down, then fold them up tight, shove them back in the box, then take all the matching boxes that are on the porch table, and go upstairs, then go into my daughter’s room, move the bedside table – nope, I’m not even done explaining yet – open the little door, get on my knees, reach into the dark recesses of the storage space, pull out one of the Christmas boxes, put the boxes in, then hoist myself to my feet, close the little door, put back the furniture, and, whew.
What a hassle. It’s too much work even to give up properly, so there they’ve been there, hanging the wrong way for the past few days.
As I drive around, I admire in wonder all the sparkling Christmas lights I see in other people’s yards. How high people have climbed on ladders around and around the trees! How precise the lines along the angles of the houses, even along the rooflines!
For a couple of years, I did manage to light up my yard with colorful displays all in the trees, even way out there toward the road. I loved it, my daughter loved it, and a lot of people complimented it.
But here’s the catch. It took a few days to put those lights up. For a working woman with a small child, time to do things is hard to come by, and it’s even harder to do things in winter when it’s dark after you get home from work. All your eggs are in the basket of the weekend, and if you have something else you are obligated to do on a Saturday or Sunday, you’re outta luck.
But the hassle of putting lights up absolutely, totally, completely pales in comparison to the real struggle to get them down. By the time we’re getting them down, it’s much colder outside, and since Christmas is over and we’re just doing the clean-up, it’s no fun at all.
So now I have three or four tubs full of Christmas lights and extension cords which mock me every time we get out the boxes of Christmas stuff, or, in fact, whenever I try to get through the crawlspace under the house but have a hard time getting around because they are in the way.
I did get lights up on the side porch. Of course, the string of lights that’s supposed to attach to them but reach out to go around the crepe Myrtle tree is still just sitting coiled up on the porch swing.
I’ve been thinking about how great that front porch would look all year long. The porch is new – this house used to have one, but it burned off in a fire in the 1970s and I had a porch put back on last spring – so I had to nail up the nails all along the roofline.
Hooks would have been better, but after two or three times of going to town and meaning to get hooks but forgetting, I decided just plain nails would do.
A few days after work, I managed to get up a few nails, but it’s a long porch, and it got too dark and cold to finish.
Then there was the Saturday I thought I could put up the lights before we had to leave for a funeral, but I was disappointed to realize that the cords were all folded up.
I unfolded and tried to straighten the cords, but it sunk in that it would take way too long.
Forget it! I said. I’ll deal with it after the funeral!
But it was dark after the funeral, the trip to the store and the other Saturday errands.
Inside the house, we got everything decorated beautifully, but didn’t get all the boxes put away yet.
Having boxes in the hall takes away a lot of the enjoyment of the (otherwise) beauty.
But it’s just a whole new undertaking to get them back into the crawl space, when we’re always having to run off instead to this appointment, that club meeting, or that extra-curricular activity.
However, there is one way in which having so much trouble getting my own decorating done has benefited me.
I now truly enjoy other people’s Christmas lights much more thoroughly than I would have had I not known how much time and effort it takes to put them up and take them back down again.
