We have a 40-foot evergreen tree (probably) (I didn't measure it) in our yard. My husband has been dying to light that baby up since we moved here four years ago. The problem? LED lights. A tish expensive. 

I hope you kids see what a waste of resources this has been.

He worked really hard on it, Grandma.

BUT! This weekend when we unpacked the Christmas decorations, lo, we discovered we had cleaned Target out of LED lights at the end-of-season sale last year and forgot all about it. It was like sleep-light-buying. Also, inexplicably, we bought four large outdoor Christmas balls the size of my head.

It was a holiday miracle!

Cut to Sunday. Beloved had been outside for hours. Finally he knocked on the door and asked me to help him. I only wish I had video or even a photo of this process, but I was helping. So was the neighbor.

My husband had duct-taped together five mop/broom/whatever poles and fashioned a hook on the very end with wire. The contraption was tall enough to reach the roof of our two-story house.

He had also electrical taped every strand of lights together and looped them into a cooler on wheels so he could feed them out as he went. And he checked every bulb to make sure it worked first.

I just don't understand what happened.

Did you check every bulb?

Every one.

As my neighbor and I stared open-mouthed, he proceeded to hang the lights on this enormous tree in less than an hour while we followed him, feeding him lights.

SLACK, RITA, I NEED SLACK.

There were just enough lights. I handed him these basketball-like Christmas ornaments, and he had to adapt his hanging device to open the loops on the ornaments to better hang them on the limbs by adding another prong. 

Last night he told me he wants to take a picture of the little angel in front of that tree at just the right moment of dusk to use for our Christmas cards. I told him I thought such a picture would suck because I am such a horrible photographer and it would have to be me because these days he's usually not home before sunset. I am about as good at capturing the moment between dusk and night as I am at long division. But then I saw the look on his face and immediately felt like the world's biggest asshole, because hello, he taped together every cleaning device we have in our house for this*.

So I'm going to attempt it. 

Lord help me.

*Next year he says he's going to make a better hanging device out of PVC pipe. I'm hoping he can patent it and sell it worldwide so we can quit our jobs and watch John Hughes movies all day. Stay tuned.