Why decorate for a violent holiday?
As school was dismissed two days before the actual weekend arrived, my family had four days to decorate the house for Christmas, which is an upcoming holiday celebrated by ripping a toy out of a child's hand at Toys-Backwards R-Us because it was on your nephew's Christmas list, and it was the last one in the entire Toys-Backwards R-Us store.
Why we do decorate for this violent holiday? I don't know. But we do, so that's what I'm going to write about.
My family goes all out for Christmas. We hang (actually staple-gun) festive lights onto our house, which gives a distinct outline of our roof at night.
I'm not sure why we do this. Possibly to give Santa a proper landing pad. Also on the tip of our house is a star that twinkles and flashes in various patterns.
In the front yard are two garland/light angels, which shine in the day and glow at night.
The porch also has garland, lights and bows wrapped around the pillars, a sled, a fake snowman, a little bench decked out with rope lights, garland and a bow, as well as a couple of wreaths. And that's just the outside of our house!
Note that all the items above can't be found at a Toys-Backward R-Us store, most likely because some old scrooge stole the last of it from a poor little boy who wanted to decorate his Play-station.
All of our decorations have come from Wal-Marts or Wal-Mart wannabes. That really doesn't mean anything, because no matter where you get them-Dollar General or Daddy Warbuck's Christmas Tree-they're still going to be the same quality: lousy. I'm mostly talking about light strands.
Like I said before, our roof has lights outlining every little detail. This task is done by my dad, who, every year, climbs up on the roof and begins stapling strings of lights to the peak. (I'm really surprised that our roof has not begun to leak yet.)
This year, everything went as usual: The weather was great (until we actually started decorating), Dad climbed up on the roof and began putting more holes in it.
All the lights worked fine... until he was finished and was off the roof. That's when part of a 100-light strand stopped working.
As it was nightfall, it was dark outside, and because the lights weren't working, there was no way for Dad to see what he was doing, so he left fixing the lights for another day.
Fixing this problem, as always, was pretty simple. He climbed back up onto the roof and began flicking the bulbs that didn't work. Eventually, he flicked the right one, and they all started shining again.
The same scenario described above was not limited to the roof. The same phenomenon happened everyplace we have lights, no matter how new the set. This was because the lights came from a cheap place like Wal-Mart, and not from an expensive place like Toys-Backwards R-Us, which doesn't even have them.
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UFO: In 1895, a New England Telephone employee, Ralph Morris, while looking at the newly installed strings of lights that were made for the telephone switchboard, decided to take some home to decorate his Christmas Tree. The was first electrical light decorated Christmas tree.
