Ruby
Hanging up the Christmas lights is no joke, and putting them up with your brother is a task within itself. Every year, my brother and I are faced with the grueling task of having to work together to put up the Christmas lights, and every year it ends in an unnecessary argument about which lights go where (even though we do it the same exact way every single year).
We have a little bit of a problem with decorating for Christmas. Our house ends up looking like a cross between Santa’s workshop and a museum. The decorations my mother puts around the house every year are so pretty, but you CAN’T TOUCH THEM. There isn’t one Christmas knick knack that isn’t made of ceramic or glass. It’s so stressful to even walk in some parts of the house in fear of knocking something over and facing the wrath of my mother.
As decked out that the inside of the house is, the outside is even more decorated. Colored and white lights on the roof, around the porch railing, a giant Santa on one side of the house and a penguin that lights up on the other side, candy cane lights that line the sidewalk, lights on the tree in the yard and a Bluetooth speaker that hooks up to our lights to make synchronized light shows– we take Christmas very seriously.
This one particular year that my brother and I were hanging up the lights, we had a number of little mishaps. First, not one whole strand of lights worked. We had a whole bunch of strands that had half the lights working or no lights working. That wasn’t going to work for us. We spent an hour trying to fix the lights by replacing the old bulbs on the strand with new ones, and still nothing worked. So, we threw the old lights out, bought a bunch of new ones and got to work.
The next little mishap was that all the nails that we hang the lights to the roof with had mysteriously disappeared. Quickly improvising, we thought that outdoor tape would hold the lights up. It didn’t. So we had to take time to put new nails on the roof so we could properly hang the lights. Finally, we could get to work.
My brother had volunteered to to be the one who climbs the ladder to hang the lights. He had to be the one to do it though; I have an issue with heights. So up he climbed on the ladder and on the ground I stood, fishing the stand of lights to him. Everything was going fine and we had almost finished hanging the lights without any major arguments when the third and biggest accident of the day happened.
We were so close to hanging all the lights on the roof. There had been old bikes leaning against the house right where we had the ladder, and neither of us had even thought to move the bikes out of the way so we could get closer to the roof. My brother was trying to stretch towards the roof when the ladder suddenly snapped. I had a split second decision to make: either I jump out of the way, or try to catch my brother as he was falling to the ground. Unfortunately, I did neither. I didn’t even move.
Everything happened in slow motion. The ladder fell on me, my brother fell on the ladder, and our bikes fell on top of my brother. I remember laying on the ground like Flat Stanley trying to understand how all of this just happened.
When everything fell, it sounded like an earthquake, so of course my mother comes out of the house screaming in worried rage. She sees us both laying un the ground, not moving, and runs over to us.
“Alex! Alex, are you ok?! Are you hurt?!” My eyes snapped open. I waited for my mother to ask me if I was ok, but it never happened. She proceeded to help him up and bring him inside while I was still on the ground with the ladder on top of me.
I got myself up, moved the ladder, put the bikes back and went inside. Alex was seated at the kitchen table holding an ice pack to his head as our mother was throwing questions at him, still trying to see if he was ok. I looked at him and he just smirked at me, proving that he was absolutely fine.Huffing and puffing, I went back outside to finish hanging the lights on my own. My brother had boycotted hanging the lights for the rest of the day. I was happy about it only because I could hang the lights my way, instead of arguing with him about it.
A couple hours later, all the lights were up, and it was dark out. We go to plug them in and I was ready to show everyone the perfection that was that season’s Christmas light display. As soon as the lights were on, my eyes were immediately drawn to one lone ruby red light on the strand of white lights on the roof.
I don’t know how I missed it, but it just made me laugh as I thought to myself “nothing’s perfect”. And I’m perfectly ok with that.
To this day, we still hang the lights together. even if we still argue the whole time, and every year a new ruby light makes it’s way to the strand of white lights, reminding us that nothing is perfect, even though our teamwork is pretty close to it.