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Dad wasn’t the type to rush in to the Christmas spirit, particularly when it came to putting up holiday decorations. I can remember one Christmas in the early 1970s, when he put off buying a Christmas tree, the natural kind, until just a few days before Christmas.
Dad would lose his mind at the way today’s retailers hawk Christmas merchandise in October and some homeowners display outdoor Christmas decorations in November.
Dad seemed to take pride in pulling his children out to the mid-December chill to hang Christmas lights we could have put up in late November, when temperatures were still above freezing. Perhaps he believed cold air, snow and biting winds developed character in young people.
I can recall working with each of my seven siblings — five brothers and two sisters — in hanging the decorations over the years, and I have distinct memories about the projects we conducted from the early 1970s through the 1990s.
We frequently put the lights up on the Sunday that arrived two weeks before Christmas, but sometimes they went up on a weeknight, just a few days before the holiday. We always puts the outdoor lights up after dark. We told ourselves this allowed us to get the full effect of the lights glowing in the darkness, but really it was because we dreaded going outside to work and always found something else to do earlier in the day.
Even Dad seemed to procrastinate and would put off tackling the task until Mom reached the limits of her patience. At that point, her frequent requests for the lights to be put in place became a demand for the job to be completed without further delay. That’s when Dad would find the determination to push aside all the distractions and commence work on hanging the lights.
Dad never replaced anything simply because a newer model or version was available. With eight children to feed and cloth he never had much in the way of disposable income. Most items in our house were replaced only after they reached the end of their useful lives. This meant most of our belongings, including our Christmas decorations were several years older than me by the time I was added to the work detail at age 8.
Our outdoor lights were an assortment of strings of lights we collected over the years. Some consisted of multi-colored light bulbs as big as a man’s thumb and were mounted to heavy-gauge electrician’s wire, some of it more than half an inch thick. I think some of these dated to the 1950s. Other strings were a bit more contemporary but often contained only small, clear lights.
The front door of our house was located in the center of the front wall. We displayed the lights on evergreen shrubs planted to the left and right of the front door.
We usually employed a loopy, layering of lights upon the tops of the bushes, sort of a sophisticated, but casual look. It wasn’t original, but it did the trick. Dad was a hands-on supervisor, but spare with his directions. His comments during these projects usually were limited to “cut the crap” and “you’re doing it wrong, dumb ass.”
The entire process, from pulling boxes crammed full of lights from the attic to making final adjustments to the display, took a few hours, depending on how tightly we had balled the strings of light before shoving them into boxes the previous January and tossing those into the attic. Every project would include the kind of the humor, frustration, teamwork and insults commonly aired during moments of shared misery. Dad always contributed his special brand of refined cursing.
Dad’s style was to make sure we did not complete more than one decorating chore at a time. If we spent a few hours putting up outdoor lights, that was enough. The interior decorations could wait for another day. I figured out later, when decorating my own house for the holidays, that Dad limited the number of hours we spent working together to keep us from harming each other. He was a smart man.
Dad passed away in February 1995, creating a void in my life that will never be filled. I think of him often throughout the year, but particularly when my wife starts decorating the house for Christmas. He gave his children so many gifts at Christmas over the years and created many priceless memories.
My favorite memory from our decorating projects dates from 1978. My younger brothers, Patrick and Michael, my sister, Kate, and I were standing with Dad in the mid-December darkness on the sidewalk in front of our house, admiring our work on a nearly completed display. “Hell, that looks better than it did last year,” Dad said. “Let’s call it done for this year and go back inside. It’s cold.”
—Kevin Botterman can be reached at kbotterman@gmail.com. Follow Fireside Notes on Twitter.
