In my family, we put up Christmas lights.
But only barely.
I say this because it is a half-hearted attempt to begin with, and then we usually almost always fail in that attempt. Though we do somehow manage to eke out that small win each year. Here's how it goes:
Our house is a split-level, so it's half-a-story too tall for us to do the whole works. We do actually have a way to get up to the roof, but it's pretty iffy, and with my family "iffy" is plenty enough a deterrent. Mom's scared, Dad's old, and I'm Strugglebucket; any way you look at it, this would end in tears. So instead we just put lights up above the garage and along the line of the house's level-split until it frames the front door.
This is a long, involved process which begins with trying to find the box of lights in the garage. All of our Holiday Stuff is together in one convenient location, but somehow each year it seems to be a completely different location from the last, so it requires quite a bit of rummaging around. As soon as Dad and I manage to wade through all the snorkels and inflatable pool toys and find the winter goods, Mom will come running out from the house demanding we find the box with her holiday clothes, because god forbid it snows before she's wearing the sweater with reindeer on the sleeves or (more importantly) the socks with snowflake-lace trim and jingle bells sewn onto the hem.
As soon as Mom's wandering off again with a box large enough to have once housed a refrigerator, Dad and I drag out strings and strings and strings of Christmas lights, which we swear we had put away all wrapped up neatly and untangled last year, damn it.
The first order of business is to plug in all the lights and make sure they are all still working. After a few minutes of manful boasting about being able to handle the cold, Dad agrees to bring the lights inside for this process. I am volunteered to brave the cupboard under the stairs to find an unused powerstrip (this cupboard is a veritable graveyard of extension cords and cables of all kinds). Said powerstrip is then plugged in to the already daisy-chained set of powerstrips that branches, hydra-like, from the only outlet in the work room.
Our two strings of lights, one for above the garage and then two together for along the front of the house, are wrapped around orange plastic extension-cord spools, which gives the illusion of order, despite the fact we will later spend twenty minutes untangling it all. We plug them into the powerstrip without unwrapping them, one at a time. Neither string lights up.
We spend fifteen minutes carefully unscrewing and re-screwing each bulb, one by one, just to be sure they are all in their sockets properly, before Dad plugs them in again. Neither string lights up. Dad curses mildly before starting to check the socket casings, but thankfully it is at this point that I notice our powerstrip is not actually turned on.
Both strings light up.
There are, of course, bulbs out. Not to fret, however, because we also have three boxes of unused strings of lights, all of which are in better condition than the ones we use but that isn't the point damn it we already have these specially configured for our purposes so why bother trying to recreate it all with new strings when it would only be a headache and we can just keep fixing these up each year now shut up and hand me the other box...
We cannibalize these other strings for bulbs instead. Dad reaches for the oldest-looking box, the images on the cardboard case faded and yellow and clearly from the early nineties, at best. There are already a dozen bulbs rolling around loose in this box, and he insists on trying these first, because surely if they were broken, we would have thrown them out? Surely, I agree, since we have two drawers upstairs full of dead batteries and jars upon jars of pens that have little or no ink in them. But Dad will not be swayed.
We swap out a dead green for a rolling-around-loose-in-the-box green, and then plug in the string. There is a pop, a flash, and the whole string goes dead. I burst out laughing and Dad looks daggers at me. Grudgingly, he agrees to throw away the other loose bulbs.
But now our string has shorted out, and needs a new fuse. Dad braves the cupboard under the stairs and returns ten minutes later with several old film canisters full of varying sizes of fuses, none of which appear to fit the lights, which doesn't matter because when we opened up the plug to check the size we realize there are actually spare fuses inside the plug casing itself.
Fuses replaced, we begin the slow process of changing each burnt-out bulb. Pulling replacements bulbs from the newest box (late nineties, maybe?), we try to match color-for-color but end up very red-heavy. I also forcibly take each old bulb from Dad and very purposefully throw it away.
By now it is dark outside, and feels twenty degrees colder than when we started. I dig the ladder out from the back of the garage while Dad starts setting up extension cords, both of which turn out to be tasks surprisingly free of difficulties. Next come the twenty minutes of untangling the strings from their spools, which takes place on top of the hedges along the house, because otherwise we would doubtlessly manage to step on the bulbs.
There are three separate occurrences of two red bulbs side-by-side. Strugglebucket's OCD tendencies demand immediate rectification, and Dad agrees, if only to stop me whining. We swap out bulbs to make things more adequately random, and when the string is plugged in it does not light up. Ten more minutes of finagling and some more muttering from Dad and everything works again.
To put the lights up above the garage, I sit on the lowest rung of the wobbliest ladder on earth to make sure it doesn't pitch my father onto the concrete of our driveway. I also have a pocketful of the plastic hooks we hang from the gutter to hold up the lights, and the first one I hand up to Dad snaps in half. So does the second. And the third. Dad jerry-rigs the clips on the bulb casings themselves, and most of them work.
Then he uses eleventy-seven pieces of electrical tape to hold the extension cord against the underside of the roof. It falls off before we put up the second string of lights. Later when Dad notices a piece of tape had gotten stuck on one of the bulb casings, he pulls it off. The lights go out. We discover the tape was holding the casing together in the first place, and I casually suggest again that perhaps we should use one of the other, newer strings of lights. Dad re-tapes the bulb casing without looking at me. The lights come back on.
The second string of lights goes along the brick at the house's split level from the garage to the door, and then above around the door. For this we just tuck the cord that separates the bulbs down between the plastic trim that separates the brick from the vinyl siding, though we do have to stand on the low hedge in front of the house to reach the siding. Halfway through this process, the trim snaps off. Through sheer force of will and stubborn anger and the need to get in from the cold, we force the trim back in place and finish tucking in the lights.
At this point we're too tired and frustrated to deal with really securing the string around the door, so we just leave it loose and go inside and have something hot to drink. There is a small betting pool on whether or not it will take someone accidentally slamming a bulb in the screen door before Dad bothers to fix it.
Also when changing into pajamas later I found burrs from the hedge stuck up my pants.
But the point is, our house is pretty.
Also, apparently, we have enough net-lights to cover roughly a third of our hedge. Dad did this when I wasn't looking, because why the hell would you only cover a third of it so the house looks ridiculous now shut up and take them down right this instant. I put them back in the garage when he wasn't looking.
