A Good Provider

You know that thing where you decide your family needs a thing and you will stop at nothing to get it? It’s definitely a strong urge, especially this time of year.

No, I didn’t bite anyone. I can’t believe you would ask that. (I can totally understand your asking that.)

Well, this weekend I decided we needed more Christmas lights. It’s Christmas, dammit, (I use that excuse to rationalize a lot of things, FYI) and it’s been a dreary year, and WE NEED MOAR LIGHTS.

“WalMart has strings for a dollar,” my child said. Oh, my sweet summer child…

I did not, for the record, imagine for a moment that WalMart still had strings for a dollar less than two weeks before Christmas. I am just a bit wiser in the world than that. But whatever, they probably had lots of other lights. We made a plan to get to WalMart by 8 a.m. on Sunday, thus avoiding the plague-bearing maskless mobs one certainly effing hoped.

The child, to no one’s surprise, was not up. I went alone.

WalMart had lots of lights! Lots and lots of clear, unspecial, unwonderful, clear lights.

Not good enough. I went to Home Depot (after tossing a lot of stocking stuffers into my cart, into bags, and then into my car, of course.)

Home Depot had the same situation. Except it has those tall shelves, so you can’t see as well, and some of the boxes SAID they were colored lights, so I looked. And looked.

And I found a net of four hundred white lights that change to multi-colored and chase and twinkle and do all the fancy stuff. They were most definitely NOT a dollar, but that’s okay. The early bird gets the dollar lights, clearly.

And then I found a reindeer made of sawed off pieces from Christmas trees, so despite the fake tree, the living room now smells right.