I’m a huge Christmas sap.

Every year as we sit around the Thanksgiving dinner table, I’m filled with such happy expectation for the forthcoming holiday season. There’s so much promise, joy, intrigue, suspense, thrill, cozying up by the fire as it snows outside (well, theoretically anyway; I have neither a fireplace, nor snow. Colorado has forgotten it’s supposed to be a wintery state).

We had already gotten a tree for my mother’s home but I needed to charm up my little studio apartment too. So out came the white Christmas lights, nails, a hammer and my desk chair. The last of which, I would discover, wasn’t all too reliable. (Which is the nice way of saying it tried to kill me. Four times. The fact that I’m just a klutz is besides the point. No, really.)

I had arbitrarily decided two boxes of 100 white lights each would be enough to fit my needs. No measurements went into the making of this decision. But, when you have a small studio apartment barely big enough for yourself, two-hundred white lights suddenly sounds like quite a lot. Two-hundred is a big number.

…Yeah, this is how I function. Sorry you had to find out this way.

#1: Wrap self in lighted strand, by spinning in circles like a 5-year-old.

#2: Try to take a photo.

#3: Realize taking said photo isn’t as easy as you hoped.

#4: Untangle self.

#5: Move on to playing with slow shutter speeds to create little light shows.

#6: Imagine you’ve captured the travels of a wayward firefly.

#7: Do this for about 20 minutes.

#8: Vow to not subject blog readers to all of the resulting photos.

#9: Finally start hanging lights.

#10: Realize you have a problem when half the strand slips almost immediately off the nail.

#11: Locate electrical tape and go to town. “Take that!”

#12: Finish stringing lights.

#13: Realize you have another problem…

#14: So much for your rock solid, fool-proof calculations.