Morning all. I hope everyone had a fabulous weekend. I pounded back vitamin C and it seems to have helped. Less stuffy and for the first time in three days, no watery eyes. I think it might have actually been the flip flop weather more than an actual illness that did me in. Hopefully this week the weather will be less dramatic. For now let’s work on something we can control, the morning prompt. Timers at the ready and off we go.
I like the set up. Someone’s first time decorating for Christmas, the unspoken competition. Something is going to happen clearly. I just don’t know what. But I like the set up.
Monday, December 16th: The lights blinked off and on.
The lights blinked on and off. He stood there in the living room watching them. Were they supposed to do that? He didn’t know. This was his first time putting up a Christmas tree and he had never worked with Christmas lights before. When purchasing the string of lights now decorating his tree he went for the box marked EZEEEE. He assumed that was designed to make things easy on him. It didn’t even require proper spelling.
The only thing he knew about Christmas lights, other than that they were lights, revolved around horror stories others told of holiday’s past. When he opened this box he was pleased to see the string was neatly wrapped around a carboard piece and thus not tangled. He hoped that if he put them away carefully at the end of the season they would remain untangled for next year.
‘Aren’t we being optimistic,’ his inner voice chimed in. He ignored it as he watched the lights blink on and off. He checked the packaging. There was very little text on the box and most of it was not in English. He set the package off to the side. “I’ll just work on the other decorations,” he decided. The out door lights were sturdier, and he hoped less likely to break should the weather turn inclement. He had what he hoped would be all the items needed to string the lights. His plan was simply. He wanted a string of lights around the eaves of the roof and down the banisters of the porch leading to the pathway. He had some lights he could insert into the ground on spikes leading from the front door to the house and he had a couple of extra strings of lights to wrap around the two evergreens in his front yard.
He took his items outside and decided to start with the roof. He waved to his neighbor, who was also stringing up lights. They were going all out. He watched them as he retrieved his ladder from the garage. The number of lights was staggering and he could only imagine what their electric bill would look like at the end of the month. He also saw several deflated balloon looking things in the yard. As they used something similar at Halloween for inflatable ghosts and ghouls, he guessed they were inflating some sort of Christmas themed ones now. As the puddled of material on the lawn were mostly red and green he figured it was a safe guess.
While he was willing to climb on the ladder and hook a string of lights under the eaves, he was not climbing on the roof. He had no desire to see his roof that upclose and personal in general. He hired people for repairs and left dealing with it to them, He didn’t want to accidentally cause himself a roof leak in the name of holiday décor.
‘Besides I don’t want to get involved in the competition.’
The neighbors were distantly friendly. The occasional nod and wave was exchanged between them. However it had not escaped his notice that there was some competition between several of the families in the holiday decoration department. While some were installing their lights to day, as he was, others were already decked out. He had noticed that as soon as someone looked as though they went more elaborate, additional items were added.
No one seemed to talk and there was no open hostility, but it was a competition nonetheless and he had no desire to get on anyone’s bad side.
Ten til Midnight 