Posted: 12/15/06
DOWN HOME:
Wanted: Yard-art Christmas Chicken
The nightly news stirred a strong sense of deja vu a couple of weeks ago. A correspondent stood in front of a local hospital, droning in somber sincerity about two unfortunate men who lay similarly incapacitated in similar rooms.
They’re both paralyzed after falling off extension ladders as they strung Christmas lights on the roofs of two-story houses.
I sympathized with those men and hoped for their healing.
But I also empathized with their plight.
A few years ago, shamed by the exuberant Christmas-lighting extravagance of a couple of my neighbors, I decided to string lights on the roof of our two-story house.
So, I calculated the perimeter of the front half of our roof. Then I took my figures to the nearest hardware megastore and bought strings and strings of lights, extension cords and those little clips you can use to hook the lights to your shingles.
When I got home, Joanna and our daughters were gone shopping. Thinking I would surprise them, I brought my old extension ladder around to the front of the house and decided to get started.
Ten minutes later, after realizing the pitch of our roof is a lot steeper than it looks from the ground and confronting the rickety nature of our ladder, I put the ladder back in the garage and packed up the lights to return to the hardware store.
The shame induced by my neighbors’ yuletide exhibitions paled in comparison to my fear of heights, which had been extended significantly by the way the ladder shook when I tried to step over the top of it onto the roof.
“A guy could get seriously injured stringing Christmas lights,” I reasoned.
Really, I never believed that. When I would see a beautiful red-and-green-lighted roofline, I’d think, “Marv, you’re the Christmas Chicken. Too scared of falling off your roof to decorate your house according to the standards your neighbors have come to expect.”
And I was right.
But now I also know being scared of a rickety ladder up against a second-story roofline isn’t such a bad thing. Because, as viewers of the local news now know, a guy could get seriously injured stringing Christmas lights.
This year, we moved into a one-story house. So now, I really don’t have a good excuse for not putting lights on the roof. Except I spent so much time stringing new red and white lights around the perimeter of our newly expanded flower beds and trying to get most of the leaves out of our yard. And now, it’s almost Christmas, and I really don’t have time to decorate the roof.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Maybe next year, I’ll buy some lights. Our roof is red, so white lights would look festive. And I can string them from a tall stepladder, so I won’t fear falling.
Or maybe, by next year, I’ll buy a lighted blow-up yard-art version of the Christmas Chicken.
It’ll look a lot like me.
–Marv Knox
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