She finishes the page and takes a moment to sip her coffee while looking out the living room window. Across the lane in a neighbor’s yard, one of the lighted reindeer lay on its side. The fall must have pulled the plug from the green extension cord winding out through the grass from behind a hedgerow in front of the house. The others still stand and remain lit.
The Evans family moved onto Mayfair Court last spring. They have four boys with the youngest still in diapers. So Charlie Evans decorates for every holiday. On the 4th of July he mounted a flagpole and hung bunting from every window. For Halloween he turned the chateau-style home into a haunted castle, complete with skeleton sentries guarding the entrance and a dozen headstones in the front yard. He even rigged a fog machine for an eerie touch.
But Christmas has come quick this year–just a few weeks after Thanksgiving. That first weekend she watched Charlie stand in the front yard staring at the house and scratching his head. Then came his scramble to collect new decorations. Over coffee one morning, Charlie’s wife, Katy, said their old house was a wood bungalow that her husband decorated with traditional lights and the Christmas tree in the front window. Katy said Charlie went so far as to put garland on his deer trophy mount–which Katy hated. This new house had a family room in the back. That’s where they put the tree. The all stone front elevation leaves no place to hang lights.
She found it a curious delight to watch Charlie unload the large boxes and bags from his car–some were from the hardware store and others from the garden center. He and the older two boys, 4 and 6, first unpacked the forms made of wire and grapevine. They traipsed about the yard deciding where to pose each animal and drove metal spikes to hold them in place. Then came colored spotlights that up-lit the front in a wash of yellow, green, red and blue. Tiny angels on stakes were staggered along the hedgerows. Wood and colored-cellophane lollypops on pickets surrounded a tree near the front walk.
She watched Charlie puzzle over the tangles of extension cords, trying to figure out how to connect a series of 12 or so ornament plugs into the two available outside outlets. Eventually he found the right sequence. He stepped back, looked over the display, and then rearranged an item or two. A day would pass and Charlie would adjust something again or add something new and, of course, he would pick up the fallen buck, check for broken bulbs and resecure the stakes.
November and December have been unusually wet this year. The ground is so saturated you can push your finger its full length into the dirt below the sod. It’s no wonder the spikes offer little or no resistance to the slightest breeze pushing against the buck. More spikes are no help either.
She watches Charlie’s daily ritual, he backs out in the morning, stops, and gets out of the car to set the deer back up. It’s the same in the evening when he pulls into the driveway. Every day, twice a day, Charlie repairs the display. Some nights he steps out for a cigarette and sees the ailing stag and does it again. Each time it makes her giggle and think of Tom.
There was a perpetually loose bulb on one string that somehow Tom always hung over the front door. He’d have to twist it tight every night when he came home so the whole string would light. Then he’d cuss it for ten minutes. She never understood why her husband didn’t just replace the thing. Then there were the kids and tree ornaments. At least once a day she’d be in the kitchen and hear a pop–only to walk in to find little Tom pouting over the broken orb. One year he pulled the whole tree over and shattered everything. She’ll remind his wife about that one when they call in the morning. Especially tonight, with Santa en route, she imagines similar tales will develop over at the Evans house.
She takes a moment to sip her coffee and looks out the window as Charlie gets out of his car. She smiles and goes back to reading her book. A half a page down a KABOOM rattles her cup and gives her a start. Charlie stands across the lane with a shotgun resting on his shoulder–smoke rising from the barrel. Strewn about the yard are shards of wire and splinters of vine all tangled with mangles of string lights and cord. At the center of the flotsam lay the belly of the beast with its legs pointing up.
From her chair she watches the Yuletide assassin drag the spindly carcass off by a hoof; and she pictures the wiry head mounted on a plaque hung next to the one she saw in Charlie’s house. She bursts out laughing for the first time in four months. "Merry Christmas, Tom," she says, chuckling, and goes back to her book.
