Pedley's Ponderings

Look, I’ve got nothing against the Christmas season. The spirit, cheer and generosity are all more than enough to warm my Grinch-like heart.

Then there are the lights. For lack of a better phrase, I love seeing a house lit up like a Christmas tree. It always makes me pause and admire the work of minor electrical engineering it took to get them up there, and I can respect an individual so ripe with the holiday spirit that they put in hours of labor to display their cheer.

That type of individual is not I, but I did brave Sunday’s blustery and cold conditions clinging to a ladder for dear life while clipping lights to our gutters for four hours.

I almost fell off three times and the ladder crashed to the ground twice due to wind gusts while I was off of it retrieving more lights. I put in approximately one hour of work beforehand checking bulbs and replacing fuses so I wouldn’t have to scale the ladder again once they were all up. That prep work didn’t pay off – a total of 8 bulbs were dark around all four sides of the house after I had my Clark Griswold moment plugging in the extension cord to the outlet.

I didn’t put up lights last year. After doing it in 2018, the task was too much to bear. We use those old-fashioned ones with the large, colored bulbs. I have to clip each individual bulb to the gutter, and you don’t realize how big a house is until you have to do that. The task of clipping six feet at a time, climbing down, moving the ladder and doing six more feet before repeating everything over and over is rather monotonous. I simply couldn’t find the motivation in 2019.

I followed my marching orders this year, though. We’re going to have a good Christmas, I was told, which meant stringing up lights for all the neighbors to see. I protested – why not put them around the chain-link fence in the back yard instead? No ladders, no hassle.

Alas, Kaity threatened to put them up on the gutters herself, which was the nuclear bomb for this particular situation. She’s got no clue what she’s doing and knew that I couldn’t stand the thought of her breaking half the bulbs on every string.

Admittedly, the lights do look nice. The style fits our old-as-dirt house, which remains unpainted thanks to my summertime procrastination. Maybe they’ll still be up when I do put a new coat on.

My friend, Dave, is a former nurse-turned-anesthesiologist-turned-nurse again due to the pandemic staffing shortages. I sent him a SnapChat of myself on the ladder Sunday accompanied by a few cuss words regarding the task at hand. A new homeowner himself, he had some sharp words about the job I was attempting to accomplish.

“No way am I ever doing that,” he said. “The amount of people we treat the day after Thanksgiving who’ve fallen from ladders is insane.”

I’m putting them on the fence next year.

Nick Pedley is the news editor of The Hartley Sentinel-The Everly/Royal News.