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Every Day is Precious: Glow comes from people behind lights
By ROB PAYNE
For Williamson A.M.
I've heard people talk about the post-Christmas letdown, or the after-Christmas doldrums. Truth is, I don't mind the week between Christmas and New Year's. When I was working, before I started staying home to care for Marcy, I often took a vacation that week. Even when I wasn't on vacation, most clients were, so it was a slow week. It gave me more time to relax, do some things around the house, and spend time with the family.
For me, Christmas isn't over when the last present is unwrapped. Christmas is over when the outside lights come down. It means it's almost time to go back to work. And there's always that pressure of ''having'' to take down lights before New Year's Day or run the risk of having a bad new year. I think of that as a ''Mom rule'' like not going in the water for an hour after you eat. It's one of those things that may not really have negative consequences, but you still do it just to be safe.
And I always seem to pick the worst weather day of the year for taking down lights. I pick the second-worst weather day of the year to put lights up. It seems I can't work with lights on a sunny, 50-degree day though there are often lots of those between Thanksgiving and New Year's it just doesn't feel like Christmas.
This year our 9-year-old daughter Darcy started asking about our outside lights the day after Thanksgiving. We had to put the inside decorations up Thanksgiving Day because Darcy was forlorn about not being around extended family. We had planned on Marcy's family joining us for Thanksgiving but had to wave them off when Marcy wasn't feeling up to it. To help make it feel more like a family holiday, we brought out all the Christmas decorations.
But I thought I was going to get away with not putting up the outside lights this year. In addition to not being able to leave Marcy unsupervised inside the house while I was outside the house, I had to use the outside lights on our Christmas tree inside. The Christmas tree lights were older than Darcy and had finally cast off their last glow. At least my Dad (and Clark Griswold) had taught me to test the lights before putting them on the tree so I didn't have to do it twice. But it left me way short on outside lights.
And wouldn't you know it, a couple of my neighbors had to go and put up all their outside lights Thanksgiving Day, making Darcy start asking about ours. If you've been around a 9-year-old at Christmas, you know they don't forget things like that. Each morning when she erased the Christmas countdown blackboard on our breakfast bar and wrote the new number of days left before the big day, she asked when we were going to put our lights up.
I wanted to appease Darcy and I admit I was feeling a little Scroogish for not wanting to put up lights when I answered a knock at the door to find neighbors putting up lights in our front yard and around our doorway. The same neighbors I grumbled about for putting up their lights Thanksgiving Day noticed that our lights weren't up by December 20. ''We just wanted it to be Christmas here,'' was our neighbors' humble understatement of the year. Our neighbors already go a long way to make every day like Christmas for us. Now they are doing it for Christmas as well.
If you know a family in need that may have fallen a little behind, consider putting up decorations for the time of year. A labor of love lights up any season.
Every Day Is Precious is a column to remind us to treat everyone we see today as if it could be the last time we see them. It is written by Rob Payne, whose wife, Marcy, was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) in August of 2000. Now 40 years old, she has gone from winning 5 and 10K races to being quadriplegic and on a ventilator at home. For more ways to help others, to find more about Marcy, or to receive e-mail updates on her condition, visit www.EveryDayIsPrecious.com. Readers may contribute to her care by sending donations to Every Day Is Precious, 2051 Harvington Drive, Franklin, TN 37069. If you have helped someone without being asked, or know of someone who has, share it with others. Send to rob@everydayisprecious.com or to Every Day Is Precious, 2051 Harvington Drive, Franklin, TN 37069.
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