Seeing the Blues

The Christmas lights are up.

Every year it is a struggle to get them out of wherever it is I left them last year and onto their designated spots along the front gutter, across the little roof over the steps, and over the window of my office. It’s not a whole lot of lights, really, but it is a struggle nonetheless.

This year it was complicated by the fact that I really outdid myself putting the lights away last year. They are no doubt in a safe and secure place now, where no harm such as actually being used again can ever find them. Either that or I threw them out or recycled them, since the treacherous backstabbing little fiends didn’t work at all last year and I never bothered to figure out why. One or the other.

So I went out and bought new ones.

Fortunately the LED kind has come down considerably in price in recent years, so in the long run it was probably cost-effective just to replace them.

That was only the first of my hardware store trips, though. There was also the trip to find new clips to mount the lights to the roofline, since I did not have as many of those as I thought I had. This was several trips, in fact, as apparently everyone else on earth had stocked up on them last year to the point where manufacturers had given up hope of selling any more of them this year and thus did not supply them to most of my local retail outlets.

It took most of the morning, but the lights are all there, and they work, at least the ones on the roofline do. The net lights over the bushes are still not plugged in, since they are older and do not have grounded plugs and thus our extension cords don’t fit.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

The girls always look forward to the lights going up, so I have to do it early – one year I let it go into December and by the time I had a chance there was already a foot of snow on the ground, which for me is sufficiently holiday-esque even if the girls disagreed.

The one thing that I insist on, as my prerogative as the lighting guy, is that all of our lights be blue.

I do so love houses lit up all in deep blue lights. They have always struck me as more peaceful and elegant than the usual bright colors of the holiday.

As we slide pell-mell into the controlled chaos of another Christmas season, a little peace and elegance goes a long way, I think.