The Lights That You Have
By: Kj Baier
Tags: Holiday Season, Home Improvement, Christmas, Anger Management, Parenting

You decorate with the Christmas lights that you have, not the Christmas lights that you want.

Paraphrasing and misappropriating Donald Rumsfeld. Sure. Yeah I’m going there. Here’s where I’m not going: 9/11-Iraq War conspiracies. (You go there, and don’t tell me what you discover.) Still, this is what I found myself saying to my 10 y.o. son when we put up Christmas lights outside the house last week. I didn’t really say the words as much as I muttered them in resignation, discarding another string of lights that contained burn outs near the connectors.

To string together Christmas lights you need to connect one plug after another and build that long string of lights you can wrap around a tree or whatever. If there’s a dead bulb directly next to the connector, the flow of energy will end at the dead bulb and your string of illumination comes to a stop. Or at least that’s what I know from my own garage-based research. To re-establish the flow of energy you have to dig through the bin: years of empty boxes, tiny bags of little fuses, dead pine needles and rodent shit until you think you’ve found the right bulb that will fit into the puzzle, gently but strongly pull the dead bulb out of its essentially permanent molded plastic socket in the light string, replace with the new bulb, and just-like-that you have re-established your light sting.

What actually happens though is you try to pull out the stubborn bulb with your fingers and the hard plastic starts to scrape your flesh so you get gloves but the gloves are too bulky to get a good grip on the little thing and so you get out the freaking pliers already, thinking your incredibly deft hand tool skills will enable you to pull the socket without crushing the bulb but you do crush the bulb and also compressed the plastic into uselessness and there’s pieces of glass on the floor, a thread of sharp wire sticking up from the busted socket pokes your finger and when the dot of blood appears you finally toss the whole strand of lights across the garage but its a strand of lights of course, not a solid shape at all, and so it kind of flies three inches like a huge blob of al dente spaghetti and lands at your feet, still wrapped around your wrists and of course when you exclaim “M’erF’er!” you see your son standing there looking at you like Cindy Lu Who with a bag of Skittles, absorbing another lesson of how not to deal with frustration.

Gently you drop the lights into the growing To Be Discarded pile, exhale, say the Rumsfeld-inspired line and immediately feel awful for quoting Rumsfeld, betraying all the punk rock ethos you’ve ever espoused as a young and lifelong antiwar lefty. Your son suggests pulling another string from the bin or ‘maybe we could go to the store and some new lights?’ with a smile and a green Skittle popping into his mouth. The relentless helpfulness in his eyes makes a part of you want to release additional anger, this time right at him, how dare he be so calm! But thankfully, this time, you don’t do that.

You say, yeah, let’s go to the store. And after hitting the two big box home improvement stores and three everything stores you understand it’s December now, and you should have bought your Christmas lights in October like all the other organized holiday planners did because this year, again, the lights hanging outside your home will be the Christmas lights that you have, not the Christmas lights that you want.