Deck the Halls and Other Sad Songs

After Scott's rousing basketball victory at midday (where he scored his season-high 8 points), we spent the rest of Saturday decking the halls. First, Scott and I took the stepladder out to hang lights around the edge of the garage door, which is mainly a process of Scott climbing up and down the ladder and fastening zip ties to various hooks that I put in place in a previous year. There were no incidents, as he is a pretty careful ladder-climber and I hovered at his elbow at all times. He retreated to the house, citing the chills. I think it was because he was wearing thin warm-up pants over his basketball shorts and the pants are about 1 year too short for him now.

Katie came bouncing out the door with a big smile and her jacket unzipped to pick up where Scott left off. Katie was a wonderful assistant and we made rapid pace along the front gutter to the front door where Scott slid the window open a crack to play Christmas carols on the piano for our entertainment. All was well through very polished renditions of Jingle Bells and Rudolph, where Katie and I managed to wrap the lights around the railing and one of the trees out front, but then we hit a snag at Deck the Halls. Scott was struggling with the song and eventually R must have tried to give him a hint about the note that he was missing and he broke down in tears.

Later on it was my turn to break down, as we discovered that the new white lights that I had purchased at Canadian Tire for the Christmas tree were actually the wrong colour of white. I had purchased "cool white", while the pine & holly garland that we got for the railing had "warm white" lights in it -- even though both of lights were made by the same company and you would never guess they were different until you lit them up at home like we did. We had to strip the tree of its cool white lights and replace them with our old multi-coloured lights, since the stores had all closed for the evening and no one really wanted to put off the rest of the hall-decking, especially hanging up all the cool ornaments that the kids receive every year from the Dustan Family out in Ottawa.

Fa-la-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la.
[Sobbing]