Let There Be Lights
464 words.
Friday our neighbors were at it again. You may remember from last year that these retired folk constructed a Christmas light extravaganza in their front yard that would blind most ordinary humans. Friday, merely one day after Thanksgiving, they were blasting Christmas music (we’re talking Bing Crosby here) and stringing up lights again. Presumably they were just supervising this event, since they themselves must have been paralyzed with ecstasy by those old-time classics we only get to hear continuously for 1/12th of the year. Plus they are pretty old and feeble. So I guess they took advantage of some kinfolk in this process.
Well, not to be outdone, we decided to put up some lights this year ourselves. Since our niece and nephew were visiting over the weekend, and one of them inexplicably didn’t bring a single thing to entertain himself, we figured Saturday morning would be the perfect time to get started on it. (When I say “we,” of course, I mean “Cynthia.”) So I got out the lights. First I noticed there was no electrical outlet anywhere on the front porch. Slight problem. But nothing a few well-placed holes in the side of the house and an extension cord through the attic couldn’t fix. Then I proceeded to string together an intricate pattern of lights that covered the entire porch. It was sort of fun - it reminded me of those puzzle problems where you’re supposed to trace a line from here to there without crossing over any previous lines, except this was three-dimensional. So after I had the last strand up, I plugged it all in. It was magnificent! Until a fuse blew a few milliseconds later. Then I decided to read the fine print in the directions where it said that each light strand contained 25 lamps and under no circumstances should you connect more than 60 lamps at a time. (Not 50 or 75, but 60.) This represented a major setback for the 175 lamp puzzle I had laid out. After sulking pointlessly for a while about the relative waste of the last 4 or 5 hours of my life, I realized that I didn’t personally care enough about Christmas lights to try to build a nuclear reactor to power them all. So I carefully unstrung all those painstakingly threaded lights from the porch again, and put two strands of lights along the top. It’s a minimalistic approach to Christmas decorating that I like to think of as “not crazy like the neighbors.” It’s somewhat satisfying to think of the irony that will come to the minds of sightseers* when they see the neighbors’s Las Vegas casino lights next to our quiet, unassuming lights.
(* Yes, I know Christmas light sightseers don’t get irony, but don’t squash my dream.)
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