Patience is key when it comes to hanging Christmas lights

If the economy were healthier and if I weren't such a thrifty person, I'd defiantly toss my Christmas lights in the trash in

January - every last strand - and buy fresh ones next December.

Instead, I'll do what I do every year: drive back and forth to Kmart in an endless loop of lunacy, replacing cheap Chinese-made Christmas lights that die, one strand at a time.

You know how it goes: You plug in last year's outdoor lights in the comfort of your living room. Perfect. You go outside, climb a wobbly ladder and string the lights along a roof line. You plug in your masterpiece and it glows. For about a minute. Then a patch in the middle goes dark and you're back on the ladder, searching for a bad bulb. You can't find the culprit, so you head to the store to buy replacements. At home, you realize you accidentally bought blue strands. So it's back to Kmart, to stand in the customer service line with all the other happy holiday shoppers to exchange the blue lights for translucents.

You arrive home just as the sun sets and the temperature drops 10 degrees.

There's nothing like putting the finishing touches on your Christmas lights in the dark.

Yes, we celebrated the Festival of Ladders on my street this past weekend. Can you tell?

I live, as many of you do, in a neighborhood that doesn't exactly demand Christmas lights, but expects them. Everyone seems resigned to at least a half-hearted outdoor display plus those exasperating electric candles in every window. (You know, the cheesy plastic ones with the fake melted wax. Feather-light, they can't withstand even the weight of a short extension cord. When they smash onto a wooden floor, the bulbs shatter into microscopic shards that can only be detected by a bare foot in June.)

But I broke no bulbs this year, because I Scotch-taped my candles to windows. If that doesn't hold, I'll use duct tape.

Saturday, though, was the day to merrily string outdoor lights. Wait. What am I saying? There's no merrily about it.

In fact, the Festival of Ladders is a tense time. As we prepare to welcome Baby Jesus by installing herds of electric reindeer on our roofs, the gentle guys doing the work morph into Christmas crazymen cursing as they wrestle with 100-foot extension cords and hopelessly knotted lights.

Even happy marriages hang by a thread. Make that a strand.

"If we've stayed together through 28 years of decorating our house, I guess our marriage can withstand anything," joked one of my neighbors on Saturday afternoon as she pawed through a pile of snarled electrical wires on her front yard, as her husband teetered on a ladder.

Across the street, a brave neighbor tiptoed along a second-story ledge, fastening icicles to a rain gutter. "How do they look?" he shouted.

"Great," I yelled, "except two strands seem to be blinking and one isn't."

"I know, I can't fix it," he laughed.

That's the spirit! Who cares if the lights twinkle or blink or just shine? The trick is to keep them lit. At least until Dec. 25.

After that, illumination exhaustion kicks in and even the most intricate light shows become riddled with outages. No one cares any more.

The good news is that with the Festival of Ladders behind us, we can look forward to the next big celebration.

January's Festival of Bill Paying. Sponsored as always, by Dominion Power, which thanks you for lighting up again this holiday season.

Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net