TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

Let's talk about Christmas lights. I love them. I want more of them. I love seeing them lining the streets, and I love seeing them up and down the neighborhoods. And hey, if you can make it look like a dozen elves exploded their glittery guts all over your front yard, please do so because the amount of shine and twinkle in suburban Bakersfield seems to dim each year.

I suspect it has something to do with the economy -- foreclosures or just cutting back on expenses -- but that's not why my house is no longer lighted the way it used to be. The exterior light debacle at my joint has been an ongoing saga for years.

Several years ago, we bought strands upon strands of little white lights. Then, I handed my husband a staple gun so he could put them up. From the look on his face, I thought he was going to lock me in a cage.

"I'm not puncturing the house with a staple gun," was what he had told me. Then, he pulled out little plastic hooks that wedge up under the shingles, saying he'd be able to drape the lights on those. I left him to his task while I decorated the inside of the house. Later that day, I walked back outside to check on him. "It's been five and a half hours. What's the progress?" I asked, looking down at the lights still rolled up in piles on the driveway.

He made some comment that it was important to get the hooks right, and thereafter the strands would basically hang themselves. Two more hours later, only a fraction of the house was done. "Do you think it's time to kick this party into high gear?" I asked.

"You want to do it?" he snapped.

Heavens no, I had thought to myself.

Fast forward a few years and he's outside again on Thanksgiving weekend, begrudgingly doing the lights. I waited for that magic 5.5 hour mark -- the most it ever took me to decorate the entire inside, do the tree, and other various household chores -- before I wandered outside and asked him how it was going. (The hooks never did make things faster because when he took the lights off every January, he actually ripped them off to shorten takedown time, snapping the majority of plastic hooks in the process.) But when I went outside to ask, he was nowhere to be found. All I saw was an empty ladder propped up against the house. I called out his name, and then heard his voice respond from over my head. I looked up to see him standing on the roof.

"Charles, I'm not ready to be a widow. Get down."

"No, no, this is much easier this way," he said, proceeding to lie down flat on his belly, letting his arms and head dangle over the side while he inserted year four of those darn plastic hooks. We exchanged a few words at that point, mine packed with extra heat because I was seven months pregnant with our second son and worried the child would never meet his father.

What resonated the most was when I started explaining to him that our homeowner's insurance policy didn't include a provision titled The Dumb Homeowner, and that by many accounts, especially those of the non-construction ilk, walking around on the roof was dumb.

The next year, wanting to get back to his belly roofing, he tried to convince me that a fall off the ladder would be much more painful than a fall from the roof. "Never mind," he added. "I heard it as I was saying it." And off he went, reminding me again the ladder method was a shaky business.

Year Five was a catastrophic loss of illumination. More than half of the lights didn't work. But Charles, ever the optimist, said, "If there's a few that work, the strand is still usable." And between the funny look of the half-on/half-off lights and all the feigned whimpering I could hear from him during setup, about how he's not sure his disability insurance proceeds will carry the kids through college, I gave up.

The next few years we did a stint with lawn decorations only, a pair of lighted deer to be exact. But after the gazillionth time of backing out of the driveway in the morning and hearing, "Hey, Mommy, look! Someone moved our deer again and the girl deer is giving the boy deer another one of those weird piggyback rides," we decided the cards were stacked against us in the outdoor and festive decorations arena.

So, please, for me, light up your house because God knows it isn't going to happen at my place.

Heather Ijames is one of three community columnists whose work appears here every Saturday. These are the opinions of Ijames, not necessarily The Californian's. You can send email to her at heatherijames@hotmail.com Next week: Inga Barks.