Christmas lights

Christmas is one of my favorite holidays. In addition to celebrating the birth of Jesus, I enjoy getting together with family and friends, the food, the carols. But most of all, I enjoy the Christmas lights.

I like how houses look when they are tastefully covered in lights, with additional lights covering the trees and bushes and perhaps a display or two in the yard. For the yard displays I like a general theme: a Nativity scene, the Peanuts gang, or Santa and his elves.

When my incredibly handsome twin brother Ron and I were in high school and college, we put up the Christmas lights at my parent's house. My mom and sister weren't fond of heights, and my dad wasn't as spry (and our older brother didn't live at home), so putting the lights up was our job.

Mom also had a Nativity scene in the front yard, plastic and lit from the inside. We had Mary and Joseph, the baby Jesus (of course), the shepherds and various animals. But in a nice mixing of genres that always made me chuckle, we also had Santa on the roof overlooking the scene.

At my house every Christmas I put up lights on the roof and in the tree in my front yard. Sometimes I've had some in the bushes and around the garage, depending on if I can get all the light strands working. And in the future I hope to add more lights, and I want to have a nicely lit Nativity scene in the front yard: Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus, the shepherds and various animals. And in honor of my mom I might even have Santa standing amongst the shepherds.

He was a saint, after all.