For the past few holiday seasons as I’ve driven all over town from here to there, I’ve noticed more and more immaculately illuminated houses that stand out from the rest. These homes are adorned with tasteful Christmas lights, hung perfectly along the entire perimeter of rooftops and even on the steepest of ridges. Strings of lights that do not sag, with bulbs that are spaced with exact symmetry.
I can pick these professionally lit homes out from a block away. Sure enough, as I slow down to admire the next-level precision, I’ll spot a sign in the front yard tactfully left behind by the company that says something like, “Santa’s Elves Professional Holiday Light Installation: 1-800-GIVE-US-ALL-YOUR-MONEY.”
All joking aside, I do recognize the benefits of outsourcing the annual hanging of the outdoor holiday lights. Although my husband does take great pride in flipping the switch and seeing the result of an afternoon’s worth of work, risking life and limb while teetering on our tallest ladder in frigid weather to hang our decade-old, buy-one-get-one-free icicle lights that adorn the facade of our home may not be worth it.
I imagine that if their services came cheap, he certainly wouldn’t mind a few professionals doing the work while he watches through the window from the comfort of our warm couch. He definitely wouldn’t miss the annual weekend-after-Thanksgiving trudge to our dusty attic to pull the plastic tub full of hopelessly tangled strands of lights from the top shelf, the ensuing hour-long untangling session, or the inevitable unplanned trip to Lowe’s when he finds that, at some point in the last 365 days since he last endured this ordeal, the final strand became an electrical dud. This is why, for my non-electrical engineer husband, every light-hanging session usually includes a stiff Yuletide cocktail.
Our marriage would benefit from being spared another yearly session of me shouting rapid-fire commands to “BE CAREFUL” from my front-porch rocking chair to my top-rung-of-the-ladder balancing husband. Followed by, “You’re going to fall and break your neck and never work another day in your life! But could you actually move that one icicle two centimeters to the left?”
Yes, the idea of sacrificing a large chunk of the holiday budget to set into motion a couple of young bucks pulling up in a box truck, unpacking a load of brand spanking new, on-trend lights, effortlessly distributing them across our rooftop and around our dormers, and hauling them all away on Dec. 26 is rather tempting. For the right price, our house could legitimately be transformed into a lit-up winter wonderland.
And we wouldn’t have to stop there. It’s become pretty easy to outsource most of the preparations that come with the holiday season. If you have the right contacts and the extra funds, everything from holiday grocery shopping, meal prep, gift buying and wrapping, interior decorating, and more can now be done by way of online shopping carts and hired professionals. As long as you provide your photo, online holiday card design companies can handle stuffing, labeling, stamping, and mailing off your family’s holiday greeting.
If you have $89.95 plus shipping and handling to spare, you can have a fully cooked, ready-to-eat five-pound gourmet baked half-ham delivered to your doorstep all the way from Mukwonago, Wisconsin. With a plethora of options for store-bought cookie kits, prefabricated gingerbread houses, and dangerously convenient delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats, you can spend as little time in the kitchen as you’d like during the holiday season. It can be a complete Christmas of convenience, if you will.
Maybe it’s because of the social media era that so many of us feel pressure to pull off over-the-top, professional-grade holiday preparations when it comes to our home decorations, meals, gifts, and everything else that comes with this time of year. Outsourcing can be a great thing if it allows for more quality time with our families and less seasonal stress.
But a lot can also be said for simplifying your holiday preparations enough that they remain manageable and joyful — baking an easy recipe for sugar cookies as a family on a cozy Sunday afternoon, decorating the single tree in your home yourselves with a hodgepodge of ornaments passed down through generations or made out of dried macaroni by preschoolers, gathering in the kitchen with your adult siblings on Christmas Eve to put the finishing touches on traditional homemade family recipes, and yes, even working as a husband-and-wife team to hang old icicle lights across the front porch.
We still haven’t quite found the sheer joyfulness in that last one yet, but we intend to try again next year.
Read CityView magazine’s “Home for the Holidays” December 2024 e-edition here.