By Wendy Bauder
My husband has an aversion to outdoor Christmas lights. Every year when our neighbors climbed their ladders to deck out their houses for the season, Patrick grunted and mumbled under his breath. Every year I’d point out the icicle twinklers, the strobing strands of illumination and the houses whose electric bill could power a small country. And every year Patrick refused to budge.
The year we relocated from the California coast to the suburbs of Chicago, we moved into the bottom floor of a two-story apartment building. The snow fell and drifted and froze into monstrous icicles extending from the balcony above us to just three feet off our patio. Being the winter novice that I was, I set out to rid myself of the icicles lest they give way and came crashing through our sliding glass door. Armed with moon boots and a push broom, I stood behind the frozen waterfall and shoved the broom hard against it. The icicles exploded apart on impact and flew in all directions to the ground just beyond our patio. The sheer weight of the ice giving way was so great that it snapped the strands of Christmas lights that our neighbors had lined their balcony with. Tiny colored glass shards, encased in ice, lay all over the snow. I was horrified to see that I had defaced my neighbor’s Christmas bulbs. My husband looked at the colored glass and glared.
“Cotton pickin’ lights,” he grumbled.
Until last year, we lived across the street from a man we fondly referred to as “Clark Griswold.” Clark outlined every horizontal and vertical angle of his house with white lights, including the doors and windows. One December night my husband came home from landing his company’s jet at O’Hare International Airport and swore that Clark’s house was so bright it interfered with the runway lights.
“Didn’t you ever have lights on your house when you were a kid?” I asked my husband.
“Yep, every year,” he said. “My dad would hand me a giant, tangled mass of bulbs and I’d spend hours balancing on a ladder and snaking the wire over each hook on the fascia of our house. When one light burned out, I had to get back up on the ladder and check every bulb. I vowed I’d never do it when I was out on my own.”
Last year was our first Christmas in Ohio. Our neighbors’ houses were decorated to the gills but our house stood out as a beacon of “humbug,” naked in the surrounding illumination.
“It looks like Scrooge lives here,” my daughter whispered woefully.
Days later we turned onto our street after dark. As we approached our house my daughter squealed.
“We have Christmas lights!”
Unbeknownst to us, my husband had replaced our porch lights with holiday colors; one red bulb and one green bulb flanked both the front door and the garage door.
“Keeping up with the Griswolds?” I asked.
My husband grinned.
