Light -- or get used to the dark

I'm thinking that I had better get busy with the trees. The need is still a couple of months off, but the temperature is already changing. Last year I waited too long -- well past the mild autumn opportunities -- until the snow was already thick on the lawn and no one, least of all myself, was interested in stringing Christmas lights tediously through the branches.

My plan, just to back up a season, had been to leave the lights in the trees the year before. "What could happen?" I wondered. So, early in December I smuggly and expectantly stretched an extension cord and and attached the plug dangling from the lower branches, stood back and watched nothing happen. Closer inspection revealed that about half of the bulbs had been shattered by miscellaneous winds and whipping branches throughout the course of 2008. So much for my labor saving ingenuity. By then, it was too late to comfortably disentangle the mangled remnants, purchase new strings, and begin the tedium all over again. We made due with lights inside the house.

But funny thing: the months after Christmas engaged no subsequent initiative, so that today -- almost two years since they last produced any light -- those same mangled strings of once-upon-a-time festivity still circle the trees, utterly dead, and not worth repairing. Now is the time, while the temperatures are conducive, to strip the branches and discard the strings and start all over again. Now is the time to be fumbling around among the needles and preparing for the holidays to come. Sort of like the Christmas version of Aesop's fable of the grasshopper, who frittered away the warm months, and the ant who diligently stored up food in preparation for winter, I need to anticipate the chancing of the seasons and get my work done. As the ant put it, "to work today is to eat tomorrow." Or at least to enjoy the lights.

Now, before it's too late and while the days are inviting, is the time to pull my ladder out to the yard and do what needs to be done. But right now I am drunk on the illusion that Christmas is far, far away. There is plenty of time. I'll get around to it. No need to hurry. There are other things I'd rather do.

Which means there are things I will eventually need to do --

-- like getting used to the dark.