Christmas light frustrations

One of the memories of my youth is helping Dad with the Christmas lights and the stories he would tell about getting them to work.

“You can test them 1000 times, but some of them always go out when you put them up. Usually the ones that are hardest to reach.”

That was like his motto. The first week of December was typically filled with cold fingers, moving ladders and grumbling.

I got lucky last year. My fingers were cold, sure, but all of the lights were brand new, so the hardest part of decorating outside was figuring out how to plug in everything with no outlet on the front of the house. (Solution: Two 60-foot extension cords.)

This year, not so lucky.

First problem: no bushes. The lack of shrubbery on the front side of our house means I have to get creative with about 10,000 small white lights. So, my brilliant plan was to string them along the roof line.

Target sells boxes of small plastic clips for this exact purpose. Those clips were something I always laughed at because I thought they were the cheap, easy way out. The right way to do it, I learned from watching Dad, was to build custom wooden frames to fit around each of the windows and doors. That way, you just leave the lights attached to the frames, each meticulously labelled with their location — “North dining room window” — and screw the frame into the house each year. Simple, right?

Yeah, simple if you’re a handyman genius.

I’m a rookie, so I bought the clips. And attached them to the gutters and shingles. Much easier than I expected and actually a bit clever in their design, but I’m still not convinced they’ll withstand heavy wind or snow. (Dad’s wouldn’t budge in a tornado.)

I plugged two strings of lights together to make sure everything was working, then scaled the ladder that we had precariously propped against the house using three boards and a retaining wall stone for balancing out the uneven ground.

It was slow going, but after about an hour of clipping, ladder shifting and clipping again, the lights finally spanned the front of the house.

“Hey look. We’re not actually going to need that second string, Steph. Can you unplug it since I’m way up here on the ladder? We’ll just use the extension cord and run it down the side of the house.”

Unplug. Replug. Fail.

The last 32 lights (all in a row) on the string of 150 decided they were done. The same lights that had been burning bright less than four seconds earlier. Now, nothing.

Maybe one’s burned out. Nope.

Maybe the cord is just twisted. Nope.

I called Dad and explained the problem. He was silent for a second, then sighed.

All of the sudden, I knew it was Christmas season again.