By John Christmann
It is a cold Sunday afternoon in December. I am high on a ladder wrestling with a tangled mesh of long wire cords laced with thousands of tiny Christmas lights that probably won’t work. The light strings are draped in long chains around my neck like a yoke. My fingers are numb.
My wife and kids look up at me expectantly from the ground. They look like ants. This is not fun, and I let my grumpy sentiments be known. My wife cups her hands around her mouth and yells up to me. “Bah Humbug,” she says.
I must confess, these are words I hear frequently as I prepare our house for the holidays. In fact, I have already been compared to Scrooge so often that I am starting to imagine Jacob Marley in my doorknocker every time I enter the house.
Oh, I am not a miser like Scrooge, although I do buy all of our intermittent lights at the Dollar Store. But I often articulate a high degree of cynicism over the sprawling Christmas industrial complex which generates high voltage frenzy each year and then abruptly shuts down leaving me with a stack of bills, a dead tree in my living room, and the empty pit of January in my stomach.
The fact is, it’s a lot of work to maintain a festive atmosphere of joy, and the holidays are a time of stress for a lot of people. Especially me, Ebenezer Scrooge. Bah Humbug.
I shout down from the ladder, “OK plug it in.” My son ceremoniously forces the cords together and I hunch forward atop my perch waiting for the explosion. It doesn’t come.
I open one eye and look at the long expanse of crystal lights piercing the dusk. Below my family is huddled happily together in the cold, staring in wonderment at the simple beauty of neatly arrayed Christmas lights. In the faint glow, they look like ghosts.
I feel like a new man, and I smile with a new found spirit of holiday optimism. All of the tiny bulbs shine. God bless them . . . everyone.
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