Chapter 34: ‘Tis The Season

November 28, 1980

The Friday after Thanksgiving was a time-honored tradition. Not just for us, but for most people in the area. To some extent, it’s one that held up through 2021.

After they’ve slept off their turkey coma, people emerge from their houses, locate ladders, haul out boxes of lights, and begin decorating for Christmas. In 1980, of course, those lights were screw-in glass bulbs, not the many updated options in more modern displays. That made them heavy and fragile.

Mom and Dad had tasked me with installing the lights for the last two years. I was strong enough to carry them and scamper up and down the ladder, cautious enough to not tip the ladder over, and had enough energy to do the entire front of the house in one day. The lights hooked onto permanently installed nails, which were sometimes hard to spot.

First, I had to venture into the poorly lit, cold, unfinished attic to fetch the boxes. Again, Angie helped, grabbing the boxes as I lowered them. Dad tried to help, but Angie argued — accurately — that she was much younger and could do it.

Then we headed outside. Angie started off as the assistant. She pulled strings out of the boxes, plugged them in quickly to see if they lit and checked bulbs if not, got them ready, passed them up to me, held the ladder. Dad supervised for a while but, confident that we were doing fine, retreated into the house after a while.

We worked along the front of the house. When we were about halfway done, I said, “Hey, Ang. Did you want a turn doing this part of it?”

“Sure!”

I climbed down and she climbed up, hooking the string over the nails. After a while she looked down. “Hey, wait! You just wanted me up here so you could look at my ass!”

I grinned. “No, but, if I had, could you blame me?”

She bit her lip and pretended to think. “Honestly? No.”

“See? I could be really nice and want to share with my sister, who can do anything she wants. Or, I could be just a guy and want to ogle a pretty ass. Either way, it works.”

She snickered. “Got a point there, big brother!”

It took a few hours to get all the lights up, plugged together, and tested. We only turned them on for a few seconds until they were all done, because the bulbs get terribly hot. But, if we missed a bulb on the quick checks, that meant dragging the ladder back to each failed bulb, climbing back up, and replacing the light from the spares. Angie and I split that job too, but somehow I was the only one to move the ladder.

I watched her ass. It was still cute.

As we were wrapping up, Mom came out with hot chocolate. It wasn’t that cold outside — we still hadn’t had a day as cold as that frozen Halloween — but it was warm and yummy. She looked around. “Hey! Are you kids done already?”

“Yup. Just a few more burned-out bulbs to replace.”

“Wow! That must be the fastest ever.”

Angie grinned. “That’s what you get with two teenagers on the job!”

Mom smiled. “We never had that before. I’ve grown to love it.”

Angie smiled and hugged Mom. “So have I, Mom. So have I.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Very, very much.”

We sat around the living room in the late afternoon, playing Monopoly, looking out the window at our lights and those of the closest neighbors. Angie was kicking ass this time.

I grinned. “Well, that’s the easy half of Christmas decorating done.”

Angie looked confused. “Easy half?”

I nodded. “Tomorrow we put up the tree.”

“Ooh! Oh, that’ll be fun.”

“It’s fun. But even more work.”

Mom nodded. “That thing is hard to wrestle into place. And then there are all the lights, and the ornaments, and...”

“ ... and we’ll have fun doing it, Mom. This is the first time I’ve done any of this. We had a little tree, but we never had outside lights. I mean, we lived in apartments most of the time. And last year...”

Mom shook her head. “The important thing is that you’re here now. We’ll have a great Christmas.”

Angie smiled. “That is the important thing. Thanks, Mom.”

November 29, 1980

Back up into the attic. I’m not sure why we didn’t drag down the stuff for the tree yesterday. Probably because it’s heavy, and we were already going to climb up and down ladders over and over. I went up, got the giant box with the artificial tree, and dragged it to the folding stairs. I looked down.

“OK, Ang, this is the hardest one of the bunch. It’s big and long and if I lose control of it, it’ll get dangerous.”

I looked down. She looked up. I could see she was desperately trying not to laugh. Of course. Did I set her up? Would I do that?

The box’s unwieldiness made it dangerous. It weighed somewhere around fifty pounds, was ten feet long, a foot and a half or so on a side, and made from slippery cardboard. I couldn’t hold it very well or control it very well. Angie climbed up the ladder so she could get ahold of the other end before it was pivoting down dangerously fast.

She held it, I guided it and tried to keep hold, and together we wrestled it downstairs. Getting it back up was actually easier, but that was a job for next year.

Angie went up next and rounded up ornament boxes and light boxes and other decorations and passed them down. We’d accumulated lots of ornaments and lights and such. That included ridiculous things like 10-year-old popcorn chains that we would never use again but Mom would never allow throwing out.

Angie and I tore into tree setup. It was really, in many ways, an ugly thing. Heavy metal branches with little pieces of plastic that bore only a passing resemblance to needles. We got the legs and trunk set up, then hooked on branches one by one. Then we rearranged it so the less lame branches faced out. In later years I would have a motor under the tree, turning it. Not this year. So, we set it up well away from the wall and planned to drag it closer once the lights were in place.

The lights were next. Smaller, cooler bulbs that wouldn’t melt the plastic. We could walk around and around the tree or pass them back and forth. We opted for passing most of the time.

After that, ornaments. Mom and Dad joined us for that. Sometimes we’d get into minor squabbles over whose ornament went on a branch. It was silly fun.

Once we had the tree decorated and scooted into place, one of those minor, everyday miracles happened. The ugly, fake, plastic-y tree had transformed, with the lights and ornaments, into a lovely Christmas tree. Standing back a few feet, no one saw the cheesiness. It just looked good.

We went outside. Yup. It looked good from the street, too.

November 30, 1980

This was the first Sunday without study group in quite a while. I missed Candice. It surprised me just how much I missed her. It had only been a week.

Much of the day turned into family time. Hardly a bad thing. We talked about going out to a movie, but there was nothing out that appealed to us. So, we played games, goofed off, talked, and got a little closer.

Later in the day, I got a surprise. A big surprise. Well, two, but one was bigger than the other.

We were sitting in the living room; we’d been talking about classes, school, college, careers. Angie was every bit as ambitious as I was; she wanted to go to college and have a serious career. What she wanted to do was much vaguer than my goals, though I was wavering a bit on whether I wanted to focus on computers again. For Angie, I thought her earlier joke about law school might be accurate. She had the brains and drive for it.

Mom jumped in late in the afternoon when it started getting dark and the lights from the Christmas tree grew in prominence. “We should sing Christmas carols!”

I didn’t sing. Oh, I mumbled through hymns in church, sang the alma mater at games, stuff like that. Muddled along with the National Anthem when the whole stadium was singing along. Formerly, I’d sang in the shower sometimes, or in the car, but I didn’t have a car and didn’t want to inflict my singing on anyone near the shower.

I was about to say no, when Angie said, “Ooh, great idea!”

Dad smiled. He didn’t sing either. “Well, you don’t want to hear me croaking along, but I’ll sing on some of them.”

Mom stroked his arm. “You’re fine, Sam. A lot better than some people.” He wasn’t. It was still sweet. “It’s a shame we don’t have any music though.”

Angie frowned. “I saw a little organ in the attic. Doesn’t someone use that?”

Mom laughed. “That? That was Steve’s toy. Well, it still is, I guess. He used to play along with the song books — you know, play-by-number — and not badly.”

“By not badly, she means I hit the right key, after finding it. I couldn’t play with any pacing or rhythm, though. And I haven’t touched it in several years.”