The Thanksgiving feast was still warm when Kevin ran into the garage to unearth the Christmas decorations. He loaded up our CD player with Christmas tunes and started unwinding our Christmas lights. All I could think of was, “who is this man?”

Kevin hated Christmas. He used to complain about how early is started. He bemoaned listening to my John Denver and the Muppets CD. He poo-poo’d Christmas trees and was often caught stomping around using the phrase “humbug”.

And now? Well, lets just say, just like old Ebenezer, Kevin has come to embrace the Christmas spirit with as much joy and enthusiasum as old Scrooge himself. He gleeful ran to Target to select another moving reindeer for our lawn display and I swear last night he had visions of air blown lawn polar bears dancing through his head. But by far, my favorite part of Christmas is watching Kevin hang the christmas house lights.

The people who lived here before us kindly placed hooks all long our house eaves so hanging the lights is a simple matter of placing the cord into the hooks and plugging the strands in. We only have two strands of lights which outline the eave about our front door and over our garage. Nothing special. I would budget 30 minutes to untangle and test the blubs and 30 minutes to hang the lights. So imagine my surprise when Kevin went outside to hang the lights at 11am and returned defeated at 5pm. Yes, he spent approximately six hours trying to hang lights. The story goes something like this.

Kevin untangled and checked the lights no problem. He then hung them, no problem. At this point, Kevin noticed that our neighbors had outlined not only their garage but their second story roof line as well. Kevin’s little brain started thinking and before you could say “we wish you a merry christmas” he had popped the screen on the bonus room window and was walking around the roof. He decided to run the lights up to the roof top just like our neighbor. This he did. He then went to plug them in only to realize that he had strung the two strands plug to plug instead of plug to socket. So he started to take a strand down and they slipped from his hand. Smcrack! The lights hit the driveway and a bunch shattered. Undaunted, Kevin decided to go buy replacement bulbs. Yes, the fool actually went shopping on weekend after Thanksgiving. After driving around fruitlessly and finding the parking lots packed and the shelves empty, Kevin arrived home with the only strand of lights he could find. They were purple, yellow and green transparent bulbs. Realizing how bizarre it would look to have two conflicting strands of lights, Kevin set out to blend the bulbs together. This involved removing the other strand and interspacing the transparent bulbs with the ceramic bulbs. Once this was done, he was back out the window and up on the roof trying to hang the light. Unfortunately, he noticed it was getting a tad hard to see what with the sun having set, and so he had to call it a day. So imagine my surprise upon viewing 6 hours of work. We have two strands of oddly mixing lights snaking half way across our house.

And the best part? Kevin had to work yesterday and today so it looks like the lights will remain unhung for another week at least.

I shudder to think how long it will take him to put up our lawn reindeer. Fa la la la la baby!