Gentle visitors, Saturday, before Sunday's ice and snow and sleet and perilous mixture thereof, your humble Contributor spend much of the day, evening, and night hanging Christmas lights. Around these parts, certain homeowners are veritable artists who work not in oils or watercolors but in lights, creating fantastic, luminous, shimmering spectacles -- the type one would normally pay to see. Like the original Creator, except on a far smaller scale. Your humble Contributor's artistry, by contrast, is marked by half-hearted draping of tired shrubs with flickering, failing bulbs. Last spring, said shrubs ended their earthly lives (and, quite likely, their lives in any realm) in a most violent fashion by the dull edge of a garden tool, and were replaced by newer plants, as yet too youthful and small to bear any festive display.
So, we were forced to come up with a new lighting design that made use of other outdoor vegetation, and settled on a crepe myrtle, two American variegated boxwoods, and a cherry tree of some sort. This foliage of varying heights and horticultural significance increased the level of complexity and difficulty over the aforementioned tired-shrub-drapery.
Stung by prior incandescent embarrassments, your humble Contributor tested each strand of lights before proceeding. Check. Next, he set about disentangling the Gordian Knot of strands, which would re-entangle themselves if left alone for even a few moments, like a writhing brood of electrical vipers.
Then, he mounted tottering rungs, stretching as far as his aging limbs would reach, to affix the lights, with the hope that the arrangement might call to mind, in the passing motorist, a bright constellation in the dark winter firmament. Sadly, on his descent, he noted that the highest filaments were themselves dark. No amount of bulb changing or fuse swapping would remedy this atramental condition. Hence, the dim bulbs were left, at the top of the tree, to represent darkness.
When, late in the day, the other Householder expressed dissatisfaction with the sparse decorations, your humble Contributor toiled into the ink-black night to supplement said decor. A neighborly neighbor offered additional lights -- some burning, some half so, some not, -- retrieved from the dark recesses of his garage attic. Finally, past midnight, in the piercing cold, the display shown brightly in the tired but upturned, smiling face of your humble Contributor. And, so he retired, with no feeling in his extreme members and a core temperature below that which is recommended.
The following evening, with the delicate bulbs and their tiny attendant wires shivering in the icy mix, the whole venture tripped a breaker, and we passed from light back again into darkness.
It is no secret that all Christmas bulbs are now made in China. The other Householder believes that this Sino-dominance of the holiday light market is part of a sinister conspiracy. Here is her theory:
- Westerners, particularly Americans, feel compelled to hang Christmas lights to celebrate the season;
- The Chinese-made lights are manufactured to cause irritation, then frustration, then near despair;
- The Westerner eventually abandons the whole enterprise;
- Over time, he ceases to celebrate Christmas, then question the whole notion of divine incarnation and salvation, and, finally,the very existence of the divine;
- Thence, in the midst of despondence and disillusionment, the Westerner finds a worn copy of the Quotations of Chairman Mao and rediscovers hope in the saying: "All the rest of the world uses the word 'electricity'" They've borrowed the word from English. But we Chinese have our own word for it!."
This sounds plausible enough; but, the theory is severely challenged by such festive carols as this.
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