The One Weekend of the Year When I am Exhausted

Thanksgiving.

A day and weekend of family, fun and football.
Of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie.

Of working until you are on the verge of collapse over the course of four days to get the entire outside of your house decorated because your huge annual Christmas party is the very next weekend and you can’t have people come over and NOT see Christmas decorations on your lawn.

Y’all. I’m about busted from the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. Denis and I spent a good portion of our weekend (we lost one day to rain) setting up our outdoor display. And even though we decided not to put out the full kit (almost 100 lighted animals at this point), we still put out a lot AND I had to update my spiral tree to be a 24-channel tree instead of an 8-channel tree (not as easy a task as I anticipated).

For those keeping score, my left knee was not happy with all the kneeling I did to get the light strands on the tree correctly. My back was not happy with all the bending over I did to make sure the cords were all in the right place. And my right elbow was not happy with all the unplugging of all the incorrectly placed extension cords I found. By Sunday night I could barely move once we were done. And given how much Denis did in comparison to me, I’m surprised that HE could move once we were done.

But I have to say, even though I likely did irreparable damage to my elbow (the pain is excruciating now compared to the mild case of tennis elbow I have had the past couple of months), it was fun having families with young kids walk by and talk about how excited they were about our display, and pointing out the lighted animals that they knew were new this year. We even had a couple kids come by and express sadness that we were not putting out the full display. I asked them if they wanted to help, and they said yes (for payment, of course). I texted their mom, but sadly she did not get the text until Monday, when we were already 99% done. I told her I’d hire her kid next year (and before you say, “What about CootieGirl and CootieBoy? That’s free labor!” I can tell you that because of my exuberance about Christmas decorations, they are less than enthused and refuse to help because they are Grinches).

What’s crazy is that even after all that work, we’re not quite done yet. I ran short on extension cords by about 2000 ft, so I have to make more (SPT-1 wire has been ordered and should arrive on Thursday). At that point I can have my spiral tree be 24 channels instead of the 16 active ones at the moment. And my three arches will have dancing lights versus being static at the moment. We also have some items plugged in directly to power versus plugged into a timer, so we have to go out each night to unplug those items when it’s time to “go dark” for the night (I went out to do it last night in bare feet, which I regretted after about the first 30 seconds). The plan is to fix all of that on Friday, when we have the day off to prep for our White Elephant party.

I also noticed last night that the volume is wonky on at least one song in the show – which is weird and unexpected. It’s a stereo song in which the two vocalists are each on their own “side” of the track. If you had headphones in, one voice would be in the left earbud, with the second voice in the right earbud. Last night on the radio I could only hear the right side, not the left. So the song made no sense whatsoever. Tonight I’ll remove that song from the program until I can figure out why the sound is off.

But now that the decorating is pretty much done, this week we’ll begin focusing on our next event: White Elephant 2018. It’s our 20th year hosting, and we have some special surprises in store for our party attendees, as well as a great gluten-free, keto-friendly, vegetarian menu that includes plenty of carbs and bacon for non-diet-watching folks, too.