December 6, 1999
Greetings from the outskirts of the Holidays:
As mentioned here before, my family is fervently dedicated
to leaving on every light in the house. They approach this task with an almost
religious zeal. If they could figure out
how to do it, they would leave on the little light in the refrigerator. As it is, I am certain we have delayed the
onset of winter just from the heat put out by the light bulbs in our
house. However, my son Harrison
realized that there are still hours in each day that lights are not on.
1:48 a.m., for example.
I am usually unaware of the absence of lights being left on
at this hour, and Harrison being the considerate boy he is, turned on the hall
light and bathroom light in order to illuminate me. When I finally got up to see why the light
was on, he was in bed asleep, indifferent to glaring light or inquisitive
fathers.
To further our indebtedness to the utility companies, my
family insisted on adding more lighting to the outside of the house, since we
already have every light inside the house turned on. This takes the form of “Holiday Icicle
Lights”, a popular form of exterior illumination in the Midwest, designed to
mimic 400 watt icicles commonly found in nature.
The hanging of exterior lights on our house is the culmination
of a nine year long negotiation between Suzanne and I. During this period,
Suzanne has amassed a team of negotiators on her side, to present the exterior
light point of view, while my team has remained a stagnant minority of
one. Still, I have resisted, and let the
record show that even this year, I almost made it.
What brought the lighting issue to a climax was not the
usual peer pressure from our neighbors, and the inevitable comparison by my
wife and children, pointing up the clear inferiority of living in the “dark
ages” and so on. Instead, the coup de
grace was another display of Holiday excess erected by a family about a mile
from here. This is the Big Daddy of
outdoor display.
Each year, the Stephenson’s, (which I believe to be an
alias) build a giant creche, about 30 feet wide. Ensconced are the usual characters; Joseph,
Mary, the baby Jesus. For color, you can
also find Santa, and a few token reindeer, in slightly different scale than the
First Family, in order to firmly establish the incongruity. More important, there are a dozen or so wild
animals, stuffed and mounted in the manger, evidently admiring the infant
Savior. If you can stretch your mind
around seeing Santa in Bethlehem, then try adding a seven foot tall brown bear,
a lynx, a prong horn antelope, a gazelle, some common deer, a timber wolf, and
what we think we have identified as a wolverine. This is all lit by giant klieg lights which
were formerly used to spot enemy aircraft over London.
My children, part of the Pro-Light team, having seen what is
possible, renewed their assault on my “come to the dark side” defense. Before you
can say “double your power bill” we were the proud owner of 5280 linear feet of
icicle lights.
Installing the lights on the house was a task of heroic and
comic proportions. Most of the lights
were attached to the gutters and eves by me sitting on the roof, and gingerly
extending two fingers towards the edge, doing my best to attach the patented
clips without actually looking down onto my yard, where I could clearly
envision my broken body resting, wrapped in hundreds of tiny blinking lights.
However, there were some parts of the roof that required
feats of daring not yet attempted by any of the surviving Wallenda family. My favorite, a position that I’m sure would
have won a Gold medal if Holiday Illumination Installation was an Olympic
event, was this: Lying on my stomach, at a 45 degree pitch, head pointed down,
my feet above me on the roof, stretching my hands out over the edge of the roof
to attach the lights to the gutter. What
was lacking in form I’m sure I made up for in the gusto in which I was cursing
the little Chinese people that invented the icicle lights, and of course, the
Stephensons. I alternated this with
prayers that I would not slide off the roof and become impaled on the stone
garden angel which sits at our front door.
Eventually I walked down the street and borrowed a ladder to
finish the REALLY dangerous parts of the roof.
After several nerve-racking hours of application, I stood in the yard
and gazed at the brilliance. Our house
is lit up like the mother ship from “Close Encounters.”
Sawyer came out to stand with me. I asked him how he liked the lights. He said they were ok, but when were we going
to put up the “rainbow” lights? You
know, like our neighbors have?
Reaching into my bag of Stock Answers for Fathers, I said
“When you have a house of your own, you can put rainbow lights on it.” Sawyer said: “I won’t want rainbow lights
when I grow up.”
Right then, I would have gone back on the roof and pulled
off every one of the icicle lights and put up rainbow lights, no matter what
feats of daring were required. But my
son let me off the hook, and we all went to watch Santa arrive in Flushing on a
fire truck.
I almost forgot that while I was making memories on the
roof, I was making memories for the people on the lawn too. The little people looking up to me.
Hope this finds you fully illuminated.
David
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