Carolann and I spent this past weekend getting Christmas out of the attic.
She goes up and hands everything down to me, box after box of Christmas treasures we’ve collected together for nearly thirty years.
A lot of people these days hire professional house light hangers.
They do a beautiful job. Too good, if you ask me. Everything’s weirdly perfect. And it’s expensive.
And I think there’s something wrong about sitting inside the warm house watching TV while strangers decorate your yard. Wrong for me, anyway.
We used most of what we’ve had for decades: boxes of tangled, ancient light strands in various sizes, some all-white, some multi-colored; some working, some not. We have one light in the line of dozens along the driveway that flashes. Just one. That’s fine.
Decorating tip: dangling cords can be hidden behind brick columns.
We didn’t do any precise planning. We sort of decided where to put stuff as we went. The pros get their work done in a couple of hours or less, I guess. We spent two days and part of a third. We’re still not sure we’ve finished.
Through the process we made three or four trips to the big box hardware store and wound up spending almost as much money as we would have for the professionally perfect jobs though ours is a decidedly unprofessional result.
It’s a bit of this and that but I like it.
We’re proud that we have no giant blowup characters powered by air at night but left to puddle, lifeless, all over the yard during the day.
See, to passersby our Christmas display is just another mish-mash of color and cords I suppose but to us it represents Christmases past, when our kids were little and we were young.
It means absolutely everything to us.
