The Christmas lights

I was a little later than usual getting to it this year, but I finally strung Christmas lights on the outside of my house.

It’s a tradition in our family. Every Christmas season since my son and daughter were old enough to enjoy them I’ve put the colorful lights around the garage door, windows and shrubs. The kids probably think I go to all the trouble just for them, but I don’t.

There’s another reason I brave the chilly air and fumble with knotty 25-bulb strands and extension cords. I do it as a luminescent memorial to the first – and last – time my father hung lights on my childhood home.

Dad's memorial

Dad wouldn’t get another opportunity to decorate our house in a radiant glow, and he probably knew it, too. His stomach was eaten up with cancer. My sisters and I didn’t know just how close he was to death. He and my mother kept that information to themselves. They didn’t want us to worry.

So on that sunny December day in 1975 Dad pulled a brown insulated coat over his frail 125-pound frame – a body that at one time was 220 pounds of blue-collar muscle – and a winter hat with ear flaps onto his head, and walked into the garage. He emerged with an eight-foot stepladder, several sets of outdoor lights, a hammer and a box of penny nails.

I watched as he carried the ladder to the farthest end of the front of our one-story brick house, a task that would have required little effort years earlier but now was a struggle. It was as if Dad was carrying the ladder with a refrigerator strapped to his back.

He gathered up the lights and tools and walked them over to the opened ladder. He was breathing heavy but I could detect a determined look in his blue eyes. Dad was not going to let his pain-wracked body stop him from making this a special Christmas, complete with outside illumination.

Dad wrapped a strand of lights around his neck and slowly ascended the ladder. He stopped a foot short of the roof, took a nail from between his lips and drove it through the light cord and into the wooden façade below the guttering. He stretched the strand a little farther and hammered another nail.

He repeated the process until he couldn’t attach any more cord to the wood without losing his balance, then moved the ladder several feet to the right of where he started and began again.

A job that should have taken an hour took somewhere between two and three. Dad would stop to catch his breath – sometimes even when a nail was only half driven – with his head bowed and chest visibly heaving. After a few moments he’d raise back up and continue his work. I don’t know if Dad ever had a day at the factory as hard as this one.

When the final strand of lights was attached to the house Dad turned to me and said, “Let’s plug it in and see how they look.”

I pushed the plug into the electric outlet and the red, green, blue and yellow bulbs came to life. They were beautiful, just like the smile that broke out between the sunken jaws on Dad’s face.

Today, I'm the one climbing the ladder

We enjoyed those lights through Christmas and New Year’s Day, and they stayed up past the third week of January when all the neighbors had already taken their lights down.

Those lights were still hanging from the house on Valentine’s Day 1976, the day Dad died.

In the difficult days that followed we forgot about the lights. Weeks went by, and then months, and winter gave way to spring. And still the lights adorned the front of our home.

One day that summer I noticed the lights. I grabbed some tools, intending to take them down. But when I carried the ladder to the farthest end of the front of our house as Dad had done months before, I couldn’t bring myself to pull out the first nail. As long as those lights stayed up a part of Dad lived on. The lights were to me like the child’s room parents leave untouched when that child dies.

The lights went undisturbed the rest of that year, and then deep into 1977. Others began to take notice of our permanent light display. Our “year-round Christmas lights” soon became a joke in my high school’s newspaper. I explained to my friends that I kept forgetting to take them down. I was lying.

Another year went by before I finally could finish the job Dad started almost three years earlier. Those strands of bulbs, new when he nailed them to the house, now looked weathered and old.

Yet in those soiled lights shone the spirit of my father – a spirit that would not allow a terminal illness to deprive us of a memorable Christmas.

It was Dad’s final Christmas present to us. And I’ve never received a gift that meant so much.