The Bob Rivers Comedy Group does a great parody of the Twelve Days of Christmas entitled Twelve Pains of Christmas. Included on that wonderful list is "rigging up the lights."
If there's ever a year for that to apply to my life, this year is that year. As regular readers of my newspaper columns over the past 15 years know, there's usually a weekend in early December where I head north and put up the Christmas lights at my mother's house in Stark. Usually, this is a weekend project, where I head up on Saturday morning and spend two days getting the lights and decorations up. But, because there are no winter sports going on quite yet, I decided to make the trip last Friday afternoon.
I got there in the middle of the afternoon and couldn't really make up my mind how I wanted to get going. My first thought was to tackle the wreaths while I still had some light, but figured it might be better to do the trees and then get the lights on them as darkness descended. It's always easy to put the lights up at night because I can see where the "holes" are in the trees when I am done.
On Thanksgiving, I had put the stakes in the ground and laid out the extension cords for all the trees. I also had gotten the smaller of the trees put in place, so out of the 17 trees I had to deal with, six were already in place and just needed lights.
My mother's boyfriend, Mike, got home from work and he helped me carry the trees out of the top of the barn and get them all set up in the yard or on the porches. Once they were in place, Mike helped my mother with some stuff she needed and I started putting the lights on the trees. One by one, the lights came out of the barn and enveloped the trees. I only had to replace a few sets of lights after the long offseason, which is normal.
Once the lights were done, it was time to work inside and even that was different, as I wore a mask the entire time I was inside. I got all the candles set up in all the windows in the barn and the house and went outside to take a few pictures of how things looked.
I saved the rest of the inside stuff for the next morning and got most of them done before anyone else was up. The final part of the puzzle was putting up the wreaths on all the windows. Most of these are fairly easy, since they are on windows on the porch or easily reachable. Mike helped me with the ones that I needed the ladder for, including climbing on the roof of the barn and the house to get the final wreaths up.
The good news was, everything was done before noon, which allowed me to be on the road to home before the storm got bad. It wasn't snowing when I left Stark and I didn't' encounter any snow until I got to Ossipee.
So, rigging up the lights is done for another year. And come January, they'll all have to come down again.
The lights are up in Stark for another year.
