"Oh, my God," you are thinking, "not you too!" Yes, it seems Americans spend plenty on travel for Thanksgiving, but relatively little on decorations and gifts, and so the retail stores all but skip over Turkey day. Last night when I mentioned to Mac that we should put up our lights this weekend, he had a conniption. "We are NOT putting up our lights before Thanksgiving! That is just wrong!"
Actually, I do agree with him on this, but as I reasoned, we will be gone the next three weekends and then once we get back, it'll be after TG. I reassured him that I had no intentions of turning the lights on before Thanksgiving. But putting up the lights is going to be a big task this year so we should get started early.
The reason this is going to be a huge undertaking: sheer quantity. Somehow I have inherited enough lights to at least double our electric bill this December. My mom's parents sold their beach house; I got the Christmas lights. My dad's mom passed away; I got the Christmas lights. At age 90, my mom's dad decided he wouldn't be decorating for Christmas anymore; I got the Christmas lights. Plus I already had at least 600 little white lights of my own.
I am not sure why I got all the Christmas lights. I think I made an offhand reference that I hoped my house would one day look like the Chevy Chase Christmas vacation house at the holidays, and in my family a single casual remark will get you branded for life. I spent my junior high years drowning in parrot items because I said they were my favorite animal. And my sister, she has three boxes of snowman Christmas decorations because she once mentioned she liked snowmen better than Santa.
But truth be told, I still would like my house to to have a gaudy, blinding glare of Christmas lights for the holidays. By conservative estimate, I have at least 3,000 lights and I have every intention of putting them all up.
And so Megan and I got out all the lights on this blustery pre-Thanksgiving day while Mac traveled down to The U of O game with a friend. Thus we avoided Mac's certain disapproval for the time being (such a party pooper - he wasn't into the Halloween decorations either!).
Megan quickly learned how to plug and unplug the lights, which made me a little nervous, but she didn't seem to have any desire to put her fingers in the socket.
The only decorating we actually did was to put seven strings of lights all throughout the bannister in the living room. Not only was it too cold and wet for outside decorating, but I figured that by starting inside, we'd be able to hide our crazy from the neighbors a bit longer!
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