My wife and I really don’t do anything special for the holidays. Beyond a few small decorations, we don’t transform the house like others. Over the years we have made a few concessions. One New Year’s day, we visited a swimming pool store that transforms into a Christmas Tree retailer for a couple of months each year. There we saw the anti-Christmas Tree of our dreams. It was all-white with all red ornaments and all red lights…and it was 75% off! Whenever we were so inclined, we’d set up the tree and as soon as we did, we’d remember why we avoided it the previous year. Our cat would gather up the cotton batting we used at the base to replicate snow. In the morning it would all be in a ball next to the exposed steel tree trunk. Dutifully, we’d reassemble it. Just as dutifully, she’d rearrange it each night. The lesson here is you NEVER win in a duel of persistence with a cat. Oh, some of the low-hanging ornaments would also be on the floor, just to make sure we knew who the boss was.
Eventually, it just stayed in the attic, until we moved this spring. The white tree had aged and yellowed after a decade and a half in storage. As we were downsizing this was an easy “toss.”
As I looked at the pile of white branches ready for the trash heap, I couldn’t envision tossing the strings of lights with hundreds of miniature red dots. I unbound all the strings from around the faux needles and put them in a bag. Surely, I can come up with a clever way to reuse them in the new home.
2025 has been a year of transition and lots of work. Restoring one house, selling a second, packing, moving and the hundreds of challenges all of this brings have plunked us down in December with no good idea and even less motivation. To be fair, we barely had a moment to think of one. So I sit here with a new/old house and another Christmas with no decorations. The chorus of snowmen are not set up because of an early snowfall. Coupled with that shelved bag of red lights, our home is decidedly non-festive, just like normal.
Here’s hoping you have a “normal” holiday season, whatever normal means to you and your people. Stay tuned for more tales of lighting in 2026.
Lighting by Jeffrey 