Christmas Lights

At my house, I'm the one who decorates for Christmas. My husband, being of the Jewish persuasion, is not inclined to help, but he humors me by not protesting too much. Recently I told him I was thinking seriously of converting to Judaism because I've concluded that Christianity holds nothing for me, never mind Catholicism. His response?

"Then, you realize, we'd have to get rid of Christmas."

"What? Why?"

"Christmas? The birth of Jesus? If we're all Jewish, we can't have Christmas."

"But there's nothing objectionable about Christmas," I protested. "It's about peace on earth and goodwill toward men. And it's a pagan holiday anyway! We'd be celebrating the winter solstice, not the birth of Jesus."

"Um, no," he said, with a finality I couldn't really contradict. Three of our sons have had their bar mitzvahs. I mean, who was I kidding?

Our rabbi once said that asking a Christian to give up Christmas is like asking someone to give up their birthday. He was right.

So it was that I found myself yesterday digging through the Christmas boxes in our basement, looking for the white icicle lights I usually hang around the landing outside the front door. I couldn't find them, and I realized I must have tossed them out at the end of the last Christmas season, owing to the fact that you had to keep shaking the whole strand to keep it lit. But I did not dispair, for I found in their place not one but two brand new boxes of indoor/outdoor multi-color strands of mini-lights, each 68 feet long, that I must have bought in a post-Christmas bargain frenzy last January.

The day was what one could call unseasonably warm. The mercury hit 58 degrees here in Suburbia, and though the sky was threatening imminent rain, I knew this was likely to be my one chance at getting those lights up before winter really arrived. The time was 2:30.

I hauled out the aluminum extendable ladder and found my gardening gloves. I searched through Hubby's toolbench to find some appropriate nails and a hammer. After all these years I still haven't followed through on installing permanent hardware for those lights, so every year I reinvent the wheel. Climb the ladder, hammer the nails, hang the lights. Repeat, and repeat again.

I leaned the ladder against the house, making sure it was nice and stable before climbing up. When I got to roof level, it became abundantly clear that not only did I have to hang these lights, I had to clean out the gutters while I was up there. The roof was covered with a thick wet layer of leaves. So up and down I went, pushing the leaves off the roof, scraping the muck out of the gutters, hammering the nails into the wood, and stringing the lights in a nice straight line across the front of the house.

Around 2:50, my 17-year old son got home from school and walked over to see what his mother was doing up there on the ladder.

"Mom, I don't know why you go to so much trouble. I mean, we're Jewish, aren't we?"

"Yes. Now go get the wheelbarrow and haul these leaves away before it starts raining."

"I knew I shouldn't have come over here," he said as he went inside for a pre-hauling snack.

I kept at it, moving the ladder a few feet further to the right along the front of the house as I worked. Around 3:05, my 15-year old son got home from school. He stood looking at me for a minute, then asked if he could go play football for a while.

"Just don't get too muddy. I'll pick you up at the field at 4:45. You have Hebrew School tonight."

"Oh. Right. Okay. See ya." And off he went. He didn't ask what I was doing. The last time he saw me on a ladder, he ended up on the roof himself for two hours, while I barked orders from below to clean out the gutters.

I kept going. The first strand stretched all the way down the walkway in front of the house and around the landing before it ran out of lights. I grabbed the other strand, connected it to the first one, and continued. My hands were beginning to throb, and the sky was getting darker. But I was determined to finish. By 4:15 I had made it all the way around the side of the house, successfully negotiating the giant boxwood at the corner. I had to stand on top of the air conditioning unit at one point to reach my target, but I had finally reached the end and joyfully contemplated the moment of truth when I would plug the thing in, right next to the side door (for ease of plugging and unplugging), and witness the fruits of my labor.

As I ran the remaining lights through my fingers (the 15 extra feet that remained would lay in a sparkling pile near the outlet), I came to the end and realized I had strung the entire second section backwards. "Fuck!" I yelled to the sky, whose swollen clouds looked ready to burst. Yes, I said "fuck" while I was hanging Christmas lights. I stood there trying to decide if I should bag this whole sorry hypocritical project as the first raindrops splashed my aganst my forehead. The temperature was falling. I told myself I had to finish it, now or never.

I went inside the house and grabbed my 11-year old son, who was contentedly playing Mortal Combat on the PS2 in the basement. Way to get in the holiday spirit, I thought. And I never even saw him come home from school. I had to guess he saw me on the ladder first and scooted quickly past before I could give him a job.

"Come on!" I yelled down the stairs. "I need you to help me with these lights!"

"Do we have time?" he asked, looking up at me. "We have to go to Hebrew school." That was the first time I had ever heard him prefer Hebrew school over something else.

"It'll be quick," I said. And thankfully, it was. I moved the ladder back around the house and we pulled down the lights until we came to the backwards connector. We switched things around, and I again climbed up and down the ladder while my son handed me the lights. Things progressed much faster since the nails were in place and I had help.

By the time we got back around to the socket again, my hands were killing me and there was a steady rainfall. Darkness surrounded us.

"Plug it in," I said, thinking, I'm never doing this again.

The lights lit up, well, like a Christmas tree. They twinkled like so many stars strewn across the home I share with my loving family. They appeared expertly hung, and the house virtually glowed. I felt like I was five years old again, staring in wonderment. My son was smiling. "We did it, Mom."

As we headed down the driveway toward the football field, I stopped the car at the bottom to look back at the house. "That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown," I thought. Corny, huh? But still, it looked beautiful and made me feel all nostaligic, remembering how my Dad used to string lights around a big pine tree in the middle of the yard. There was just something magical about those lights and the idea of Christmas. Beauty, family, togetherness, sharing, peace, happiness. What's so wrong with that?

I had the radio tuned to the all-Christmas station as we pulled into the temple driveway. I don't know what my fellow congregation members would think of my Christmas lights, and I don't care. When I look at them, I think of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. It doesn't really matter if I'm officially Christian or Jewish, does it?