For several weeks now, Kim and I have had time to leisurely decorate the house for the holidays. I have gone through many different stages with regard to holiday decorations. In the mid-Nineties I can recall paying as much as $5,000 to a local decorator to decorate our ski house in Utah for the holidays season so that we could enjoy all the festive atmosphere of the holidays without having to detract from our one or two week holiday ski vacation. I remember wondering if it was worth the price, but mostly I just shrugged and considered it part of the cost of having a distant ski house and a busy career that restricted the amount of time I had to engage in any decorating. Last night, as part of our month-long holiday ritual, we watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation for the umpteenth time. I watched Chevy Chase stapling 25,000 lights (250 strings of 100 bulbs) all across his house and roof. The amount of hard work and risk (lots of ladder time, the bain of old retired guys’ existence) was incredible and had the added advantage of reminding the viewer that whatever goes up has to come down as well. Whatever holiday spirit might propel you to staple 25,000 lights to your house surely starts to feel less than brilliant come early or mid January when you realize that pulling staples out is a hell of a lot harder than putting them in in the first place.
There certainly is a lot to be said for being able to take your time putting up decorations. Besides the obvious advantages for a retired person being able to pace themselves, there is also the ability to ponder the process. I have always been prone to doing decorations that maximize impact/installation and removal time. I am always considering how hard things are to put up, take down and store. Obviously, I want everything to look nice and bring out the holiday spirit in our visitors and ourselves, but I do not want to regret any installation and I prefer to use things that I know can be reused for many years. That is a tad different now as we are getting older. I am more content with, say a five-ten year horizon than a longer, more protracted useful life. It’s one of the things about getting older that you spend a moment or two wondering if it will be the last time you have to buy something. I don’t find that so depressing as it seems pragmatic and in a weird way, comforting. I often use the expression with Kim that we all have only so many Christmases left and we must always make the most of them. That may be the key driver in making me decorate for the season, but the notion also speaks to the nature of time horizon on the aging mind. I’m just going to say it…I find a strange comfort in thinking that with the arc of life and the recognition and acceptance with the finite nature of that arc, come a strange comfort. I am not wishing for an end, but I am also not wishing for eternity. The chore of decorating for Christmas is nature’s way of reminding me that I will not be able to or even want to do this forever, so I should enjoy it while I can.
There may come a year when we turn a corner on adding new things to our decorating regime, but that has not happened yet. I will admit that to some degree I buy things like mini light strings (they are so very easy and relatively inexpensive to purchase on Amazon…and they often delver on the same day) and repeatedly find that I dutifully stored last year’s mini light strings and just forgot where I put them. I make a note to myself to remember that when I pack them away and properly label the bin so I can take proper inventory next year before reordering them yet again. Mini light strings are currently an obsession. LEDs have made it so that using batteries is profoundly easier than looking for an outlet. Batteries pretty much last the whole season and are far more convenient by allowing you to place these little twinklers wherever you want. The preferred indoor models are basically raw fine wire with LED bulges every few inches…no insulation needed apparently. But yet, There are several different types. I still have a few that are simple on/off sorts and that defeated the purpose in that you have to go around and turn them on every night. Not a lot of work, but not quite as effortlessly festive. Then there are those with the favored 6 hour timers that go off for 18 hours and on again same time tomorrow. Those are great, but wait… Now there are the ones that have all that AND have eight different setting for lighting (solid, twinkle, ordered, glow, fade, chase, flash and combo…for those who simple cannot choose). This has apparently gotten too hard for a simple one-button approach on the battery box to handle, so now you get all of that with a tiny remote that has those eight choices, a timer button to initiate the sequence, an on and off button (color coded in green and red…in the holiday spirit) and even two brightness indicators to turn up or down the juice to those LEDs. All of that priced so you can either choose to save them for next year or dispose of them in our wasteful modern-age way of living and buy them anew next year…when the feature set is likely to go through yet another set of improvements. I do not know how much further mini light engineering can go, but who knows?
We have also added to our decorating by buying new pre-wired plug-in mini trees for the front gate. I plug those into the entry column light sockets so that the photovoltaic switch that turns the entry lights on also operates the tree lights. My big improvement this year has been to find a screw-in socket that feeds a short heavy-duty extension cord so that I can forever easily attach those buggers to the column lights. I will leave those inside the column for next year and forever more make my decorating that much easier.
The big back deck add has been four large metal bells that now adorn the pillars of the palapa. I’ve ingeniously crafted zip tie loops that make for easy hanging on the pillar fixtures on those four posts. If anyone cares to notice, those large metal bells match the three similar, but different sized bells that hang from the Hobbit House. The only other hillside decoration is the big forehead buffalo sculpture bow and the leaping ram’s wreath…all easy to put on and take off.
Our decorating pride and joy, repeated from two years ago, but also improved, are our 5” red bulbs placed on the tips of 18 agave serpentine seed stalks that reach 8-10 feet into the air around the front garden. This year those bulbs have photovoltaic battery-operated lights inside that make them pulse red at light, making the front garden absolutely magical. Add to that Kim’s use of red shiny balls of various sizes on the top of our many barrel cacti with the ball size corresponding to the barrel cactus’ size. It sparks up the daylight whimsy of the garden so that it looks Whoville-like during daytime or nighttime.
I haven’t even bothered to discuss the vast amount of indoor decorating Kim has done, but suffice it to say that it too is magical, ranging from gaggles of frosted mini Christmas tree displays to houseplants and windowsills with sweet little holiday trinkets and bows. Our big indoor addition to the scheme this year are five large sparkly folded and fanned heavy paper 3D trees in dark green and beige. These are show-stoppers that everyone notices and comments about.
The bottom line is that we decorate because it brings us joy. Would we do it if we didn’t have people coming over to celebrate during the holidays? At this stage, for sure. Will we always do it? Probably in some way or form, yes. It celebrates life and reminds the universe that we are still here.