A Change In The Seasons

With May almost here I decided to finally take down the last of the Christmas lights today.

I know what you’re thinking. “Oh…he’s one of THOSE people!” Well, not to worry. I’m not. At least, I don’t think I am. I guess I might be, but I’m probably not.

First, if you think “those” people are the ones who call them “Christmas lights” when they’re really “holiday lights”, then you should be aware that I’m a strong opponent of what Philip K. Howard referred to as “The Death Of Common Sense”. C’mon, y’all! Can’t we find more important things to bicker about?

If you think “those” people are the ones who put up  a couple of gigawatts of Christmas lights each year and have crowds clogging the streets for blocks around to see it between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, then, no, I’m not one of those people. My long-suffering wife might have a different opinion of that since we do have a LOT more lights than the average for the neighborhood and she probably would have liked to know a bit more about the whole “Christmas light thing” before we got married, but I’m still not one of “those” people. Maybe just kind of a “those” people apprentice.

If you think “those” people are the ones who leave their Christmas lights up all year round, I’m not really one of those either. There was the one year early on after we had moved in here when the lights didn’t come down until late January (something was going on at work, I’m sure, I don’t remember what) and we got a semi-rude, anonymous, handwritten note from a local “Mrs. Kravitz” about “neighborhood property values” (more on that sort of thing some time later, I’m sure), but our lights are always down the first or second week of January.

Except this year, when 99% of them came down in mid-January and then I ran out of steam and daylight on that fateful day and left a couple of strings of white stars up in the dying white birch tree and one particularly difficult to reach string around the bedroom windows. No one’s said anything, no one’s complained, not even “Mrs. Kravitz”, but the lights’ presence has been a reminder every time I go outside that there’s a little chore still hanging fire. But it wasn’t a particularly high priority chore and this has been “A Time Of Changes”,  so somehow the last 1% of the lights stayed up.

Until today. There were other chores to be taken care of out in front and I had the ladder out to begin with and that annoying little Catholic altar boy conscience voice was whining about how “it’s almost Maaaaaaay”, so down came the last of the lights.

Will that annoying little Catholic altar boy conscience voice leave me alone now? Yeah, right – you two haven’t met yet, have you? It’s already bugging me about how my daughter’s car still has a dead battery from that whole Coalinga breakdown adventure thing, and I need to trim the bushes around the gas meter, and the Jacuzzi still needs to be cleaned and fixed, and… Annoying little Catholic altar boy conscience voice has a “Honey Do” list that would be the pride of any sitcom-starring, nagging wife.