Normally, after thanksgiving we start decorating. Before November's over the house is covered in red and green bows and ribbons, garland and lights, and of course the tree! This year, however, my sister returned from college with a particularly nasty flu, and we are all sad to say she did not take it back. From the time she left to the time she came home for Christmas break, the whole family was up to our noses in tissues. Mom got it the worst, sick in bed for what seemed like forever! Of course we all recovered, but not before it was well into the Christmas season and our tree wasn't even set up yet!
When my sister got back after finals, it was easier to get things moving. We took everything down from the attic and spread it all out in the garage. Among the many boxes of Nutcrackers and Angles was a project my mom had started many years ago when we'd first moved into our house. See, the front of our house and our front yard are both on the bigger side, so it's both difficult and expensive to put up lights and decorations outside. The first year we'd moved in, Mom had come up with the amazing idea to use tomato cages covered in lights and garland as trees to put in the yard. She'd never finished the project though so I'd picked it up. The more we worked with it though, the more I realized why she'd given up on the project earlier. It was only weeks till Christmas and with family coming over, I wanted something to make the house look nice. Mom suggested we just decorate the porch.
On our porch we have three large pillars. With the lights and garland we already had we figured maybe we could decorate those. And so we started. First thing to do was string the lights on the garland! Wait... Back up. First first thing to do was untangle the lights. Then we could put them on the pillars. That was an adventure all in itself. We started by stapling on end of the garland to the wood porch roof at the top of the pillar while I held the rest in a bundle over my shoulder. Then while mom made sure each piece was in place, I went in circle after circle around the pillar, squeezing between wall and ladder to get around it. We couldn't stop laughing the whole time! That is... until we realized that of the strings of lights we'd brought out to use, only one still worked, the one we had up. the other strings had shorts in them, and the one we'd put up was so dim we couldn't put anything brighter up against it. We needed new lights. And fast. It was just before Home Depot closed that we ran in to find lights. All the Christmas stuff was being taken down everywhere. The last of it was in a little corner by the door. After almost thirty minutes of searching through every shelf, we found the last three boxes of lights, and thank goodness they were just barely long enough for what we needed. We happily hurried home with our purchase, but then had to unstring all the lights from the first pillar to put up the new ones.
