Twinkle Trials: My Journey to Holiday Illumination

“When are you going to put up the Christmas lights?” my wife asked.

I looked at her much like how a cow looks at an oncoming train.  In the eight years of our marriage, I had yet to undertake this husbandly right of passage.  I had a legion of excuses over those years, of course.  We live in an apartment!  German 220v power outlets will explode!  What even is South Korea! 

Now, however, we live in a place so violently suburbia I can’t walk out my front door without getting slapped by an HOA violation.  As we approached the holiday season, more and more of the houses surrounding us put up their own lights.  Each incandescent bulb accused me with their twinkling, illuminating my cowardice. 

“Most of the people around us have theirs up,” my wife continued.  I writhed in my seat, trying like a young school child to avoid eye contact so the teacher would pass me by even though she had already called on me. 

Then my wife pulled out the big guns.  She sighed.  “I guess it’s not that big a deal if you don’t.  I’ve basically given up hope on ever having Christmas lights up anyways.”

A double-barrel sawed-off shotgun blast of guilt.  I never stood a chance.

Several days later, I had three boxes of lights, a hundred plastic clips, a ladder, and an extension cord.  I stood ready for battle, and threw open our front door to make my wife proud. 

“Please don’t hurt yourself,” she said as I stepped outside.

I looked over my shoulder at her.  “I will return with my shield or on it.”

She gave me the customary eye roll that I choose to interpret as deep affection, and battle was joined.

My first salvo went well.  I felt the excitement of balancing a fully extended ladder on only three solid touch points, the thrill of pushing said unbalanced ladder off a rain gutter to slide a light string behind it.  A whisper in the back of my mind mentioned behavior like this likely spurs most Christmas movies to paint the husband as an idiot, but it’s easy to ignore such quibbles while making progress.

I finished the first string and stood on the ground to admire my handywork.  It had gone far better than anticipated, and my morale soared.  I snapped a finger and thought I should plug it in to verify everything worked right.  That’s when I realized I had put the lights on the wrong way, leaving me with no way to plug the lights into the extension cord.

I briefly debated leaving the lights up and telling my wife we bought a new hyper-energy efficient bulb that doesn’t light up very well, but demurred when I realized that would only result in another Home Depot trip.  Up the ladder I went, clawing against the plastic clips that stubbornly clung to the lights they had so recently fought against holding.

Having taken far too long completing the easiest part of my exterior illumination project, I now turned to the most dangerous: the peak.  Our house has a barn-like aesthetic, with a sharp peak jutting upward like the Himalayas.  This is problematic for two reasons.  First, my ladder can’t go high enough to reach the tip, and second, the peak has a large tree blocking a ladder from reaching the area anyways.

I stood with my hands on my hips and engaged in the age-old practice of men everywhere—frowning at the problem and hoping it would resolve itself.  The peak looked down on me and scoffed.

Undeterred, I decided if I couldn’t come from below, I’d have to go over.  Sure, the roof angles down so steep that even the most experienced long hall trucker would think twice before taking his rig down a grade like that.  And yes, only most of the ice from a previous snowfall had fully melted.  But I had a wife to impress and boots with moderately good tread on them.  Up the ladder I went.

I took one step onto the roof, and immediately realized I would be disappointing my wife.  My foot slid backwards as soon as I put pressure on it, and only a quick scramble served by years of athletic endeavors prevented me from a holiday trip to the emergency room.

My wife, of course, was devastated.  I could see the question behind her eyes as I explained the situation, wondering how she wound up with a husband who couldn’t properly decorate a home for the holidays.

“What if I just skipped the peak and strung the lights from one side to the other in a straight line?” I asked.

I might as well have asked if she wanted me to toss a bucket of fish heads across the front of our house.  Horror mingled with disgust as she tried to keep her facial expression under control.

“That…could work,” she ground out, every word like a fingernail getting pried out with a pair of rusty pliers. 

As I mentioned before, our marriage is eight years strong.  Subtle though her displeasure was, I somehow managed to pick up on it.  “So that’s a no, then,” I said.

“Well, what else can you do at this point?” she asked.

I cast about frantically for a solution.  Jet pack?  Too unpredictable.  Trained birds?  Too much poop.  Paying someone else to do it?  Too much pride.

Then my eyes fell on the tree blocking easy access with the ladder, and the voice of Marcus Aurelius echoed in my head—the obstacle is the way. 

“What if I run the lights around the tree and along the ground before coming up on the other side of the peak?” I said, not daring to let the desperation in my voice come out.

She paused a beat, and I sensed the moment pass where she had been prepared to reject whatever I said.  “I think that will work,” she said, her voice hesitant with just a touch of hope.

So I got to it, making quick work of my impromptu lighting solution.  The tree fought me, and the plastic clips drew blood as I finished the rest of the run, but at the end, I stood triumphant.

Is this house perfect?  No.  Is my wife convinced she married the most competent of men?  Probably not.  Are the little lights twinkling?  No, and thanks for noticing. 

But for the first time in my adult life, my home can bring a little bit of joy to those who pass by during this Christmas season.  And if that isn’t a reason to be merry, I don’t know what is.