I’m NOT a grinch, really!

My daughter LOVES Halloween. She gets so excited about the neighbors who put up decorations for that scary holiday. And we’ve had the discussion, many times, about why we don’t decorate our house for Halloween.

Because I barely have the energy to decorate ONCE a year, much less seasonally. It’s just not my thing. Never underestimate the enthusiasm of someone who enjoys dealing with holiday decorations!

I remember the first Christmas I was on my own after my ex-husband and I split up. I had to bribe a male friend to help me get the storage bins containing Christmas decorations down from my attic. I certainly couldn’t lift or maneuver them down the ladder on my own. I promised him they wouldn’t go back up in the attic after the holiday, and they didn’t. Now they live in a portion of my garage where I can get to them more easily (and people wonder why I don’t park in my garage).

That first year, I think I only tackled the inside of the house, nothing outside at all. Just figuring out how to assemble the artificial tree was overwhelming. (If you blur your eyes, it kind of looks like the lights all work, right?)

The second year, I still didn’t put up any Christmas lights on the outside of the house. I just put some ornaments on two redwood trees in my front yard. Now those trees are too big for that to be a feasible options. Just like children, for some reason, the trees won’t stop growing.

Last year, I got more ambitious. I decided to tackle lights on the outside of the house! I got out my ladder and succeeded in getting the lights up on the hooks that stay along the eaves all year long. But with my paltry ladder, I couldn’t quite reach the peaks of the eaves. And a couple of the hooks came down in my efforts. So instead of crisp lines of lights precisely following the shape of my roof, I had droopy swoops across my two eaves.

I’m borrowing a taller ladder this year, and my goal is to fix the broken hooks so my lights can go all the way up to the top this year (I also intend to clean out my house’s gutters for the first time ever, but that could be the subject of a different post – if I don’t end up falling off the ladder!). That’s what’s on my agenda for this weekend, working between or around the predicted storms. I’ll try to post a picture of how it all comes out.

I’m never going to be Clark Griswold when it comes to holiday decorating (nor do I WANT to be!). But each year, I try to take it to a slightly higher level, even if I’m only moving forward in microscopic baby steps. I hope my daughter considers that something someday, even if I don’t catch her Halloween-decorating enthusiasm.

Even if the decorations don’t matter to me, I know they matter to her and probably even the cynical teenagers in my household. And seeing them get excited about the holidays make the season brighter for me as well, even if it means dangling on a ladder trying to reach the top or fighting with tangled strands of lights for the tree.