I never become a crazed-holiday person. In fact, I don’t know why other people, especially my girlfriend, are so difficult at Christmas time every year. She wants to buy gobs of crap every year that sits in the garage for months on end because she forgot to take the present to some friend she’s seen once in two years. Let her waste money on stuff nobody likes, I say, and give me all the money for a real, legitimate and sincere purpose: to have the brightest, most dazzling display of Christmas lights our city has ever witnessed.
She is being impractical. She thinks I’m too cheap, despite my efforts to buy the $400 light show kit. I tried to explain to her how it all works: stuff becomes more expensive the closer it gets to Christmas, and then immediately after, everything is dirt-cheap, but it was too late to wait until after Christmas to get the professional-grade kit. I told her she was being a female version of the Grinch who stole my Christmas.
Still, she would not budge on the budget for Christmas lights. As stupendous an idea as it was, she simply would not agree with my pleas for the light show kit (she did comment that she’d have rather bought the $400 professional-grade kit over the $40 DIY kit, which was but a brief morsel of hope, was dashed when she immediately yelled, “Don’t even think about it!”).
Now the lights are on the garage floor. I’d already procrastinated enough and decided to hang the lights up like I do every year. There’s really nothing I can do about my selfish girlfriend and her worrisome ways other than to hang the lights up and be done with the whole sordid ordeal.
I began to sort through the wires and plan where the lights will go once again. It’s not difficult to hang Christmas lights. In fact, the hardest part about it is simply finding enough electrical sockets to plug everything into. I resigned myself to waiting another year to have my hopes dashed by a paranoid woman who seems to think I want to create a miniature version of the China nuclear syndrome in our front yard.
As I was sorting the lights, a UPS truck drove down our street. Suddenly it stopped in front of my house. The UPS guy — donned in shorts in the dead of winter — seemed to be in a hurry and rushed out the side of the big, brown truck with a large, heavy-looking package in his hands. He asked me for my name. I gave it to him. He nodded and gave me the package. He made a hurried dash back to his brown truck and drove off in a way that would have made Bo Duke scream, “Woo Hoo!” in that good old boy way.
Article comments
1 - Nancy
I look forward to your article written on how you burned the house down by overloading the circuits & various other safety violations, co-written perhaps by the insurance co. or the fire marshal. It should make for salutory (& admonitory) reading by the rest of us.
2 - Mike Paahana
cause my mother lived in it