Grief Journey Day +126

FLASH FICTION – CHRISTMAS LIGHTS

It was a cold day and a colder night. Frost would cover the ground in the morning. Right now, the sky was dark at 5:30, and I was staring at my Christmas tree.

It was an artificial tree and not a very good one. Its scraggly branches were fluffed. I looked over at my blue heeler, Emmy, and she looked back at me from under her eyebrows. Sometimes she didn’t know what to think about me. “You know I don’t want to do this,” I said to her. I picked up one of several boxes of miniature lights and opened it. The lights were red, green and white. I pulled a chair over to the tree and plugged in the lights, then began winding them around the branches.

This was the job my husband always did. For forty years, he pulled and tugged and cursed at Christmas lights as he placed them strategically around the tree. I would watch and speak occasional words of encouragement as he sighed. He absolutely hated hanging the lights, but he refused to hang ornaments, so that was his contribution. He had big, calloused hands and his fingers would get caught on a flimsy branch, bouncing lights up and down and sometimes knocking them off the tree. But my husband was not here to hang the lights this Christmas. He had passed away 3 months ago. So the job of hanging the lights now fell to me.

After I had placed two strands of lights on the tree, I stood back to observe the effect. There were many more lights at the bottom of the tree than at the top. It was pretty awful. Since I could not find any green, red and white strands, I had purchased several white strands of lights. I opened one of those, and began hanging the lights on branches, starting at the top of the tree this time.

In the past, I put my Relient K Christmas CD on and began decorating the tree. It was a tradition. My husband would watch me hang ornaments. We have dozens of ornaments, but all of them are handmade by our children or grandchildren or purchased by a loved one and every one has a story or a memory attached to it. I would hold up an ornament and say to him, “Remember this one?” and retell the story it prompted. That would bring laughter and sighs from us both, thinking how blessed our lives were. How blessed we were. But I was not feeling very blessed right now.

I put every strand of lights I had on the tree. I wanted to drive away the darkness and fill the room with light. I hoped you could see my tree a mile away. There would be no ornaments hung this year, with all their memories and joy.

I looked at the tree and squinted my eyes and each of the hundreds of lights on the tree shot a bright line of light out in every direction, filling the room with spikes of gold and white and red. I sat down by Emmy and squinted at the tree for a long time, light filling my vision and a slight warm pleasure touching the edges of my heart.

This story was written in response to a writing prompt by Ester Chilton

Writing Prompts

Writing Prompts