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I’m having a bit of a hard time getting into any sort of holiday spirit this year. It just doesn’t seem like the appropriate time of year — the weather has been strange, and even though the facts indicate otherwise, I have a hard time believing it’s the end of freakin’ November already. But I can’t escape it, and with Christmas lights going up all over my neighborhood, it appears I may be in the minority. I guess I’ll have to dig around in my basement to find the annual tangle of endless frustration to join the lighted crowd sooner rather than later.

Over the weekend, I’ll be tackling the lighting extravaganza at my mom’s house in New Jersey. Part of my yearly holiday preparations include hauling decorations down from the attic and hanging the lights for her. I suppose it’s a small price to pay for all those awesome years of Santa growing up.

This year, though, I’m hoping to successfully ditch all the aging, taped-together strings of those giant, individual glass bulbs I’ve been hanging for years. They don’t chain together well and put an enormous load on the electrical system in her house. With everything running full blast at the height of the season, blown fuses and tripped breakers are merely par for the course.

With newer, more energy efficient lights, I want to remove some of the potential danger from the equation. I’m also trying to convince her that the savings on the electric bill will easily offset the cost of the lights. I’ve never looked at the electric bill for the house, but I have to imagine the annual holiday spike is enormous.

I’ve always prided myself on the lighting job I do at her house, and while it’s no Griswold-type affair, the long railing lit all the way up the huge hill to the house looks great from the road. For some reason, though, when it comes to my own place, I slack off. I use a bare minimum number of strings and work out the quickest possible way to hang them, pissing and moaning all the while. I don’t know if it’s that I get my fill of light-hanging in Jersey or what, but it just kills me to put up my own.

Even though I only use a couple of strings, inevitably one or more of them will be all or partially unlit. I’m actually considering just replacing all my strings, but not for the energy-saving or safety reasons I’m pushing on my mom. No, I want to do it to preserve my sanity — no more getting the damn things all the way set up and having half the strings go out shortly after lighting them.

At this point in our culture, the yearly bitching-about-Christmas-lights column is a time-honored cliché, but I think it’s important for everyone to know that even respected nerds such as myself find an easy nemesis in long strings of small lights. Yet for some reason, without fail, even if the effort is small I manage to overcome the worst and hang some sort of lights. It just wouldn’t be the start of the holiday season without the task!
-tucker@the570.com