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I know, I’ve written about this in the past, but after Sunday morning’s fiasco, I’m going to write about it again — Christmas lights.

Each year I get a little bit closer to saying “forget it, I’m done.” At this point, it’s become more than cliché to rant about tangled Christmas lights and so each holiday season I’m nudged a little closer to embracing my inner Grinch with no hope of my heart inflating to twice its size — unless large amounts of steak are involved that is.

Each year, it’s the same thing. I take extreme care to ensure that each string of lights I use is properly wound in a way that should be easy enough to unwind for the following year and yet after sitting in one place for nearly 11 stinking months, they still get tangled.

This is made far worse when you make the initial effort to get them untangled only for them to somehow be tangled once again by the time you get to the top of the ladder.

A number of years ago, I made the grave mistake of getting those net lights that you can fling over bushes. After one year, I threw them away because it turns out that when they get tangled it’s worse than any other string of lights out there.

Consequently, I started tearing out bushes the following spring and while I tell myself that it’s because I wanted to plant raspberries, it’s hard to overlook the fairly obvious coincidence. I apparently hold grudges against things.

However, it turned out that I was wrong about the net lights. They are not the worst. The worst, somehow, are the lights that dangle like they are supposed to be icicles.

Each strand has the capability of getting interwoven within the greater string, making it difficult to determine where the actual line begins and what is a stupid icicle.

Each light gets snagged within the greater coil creating an even bigger mess and thus creates an ever-growing ire that threatens to come from my mouth in a torrent of ever-more creative swear word combinations.

What’s worse, is that there seems to be no indication as to how this kind of tangling is even possible. None of the “icicles” even seem long enough to become entangled, leading me to think that there is some new angle to quantum entanglement just waiting to be discovered through the mass and mess of Christmas lights.

This whole sorry state of Christmas joy paradox is heightened by the fact that nobody makes a plastic gutter hanger that works for more than one season.

Yes, I know this is a risk one runs when leaving the hangers on the gutter all year around when said gutter faces the sun. It could be argued even that I have only myself to blame for how they break like glass in the second year after being outdoors all the time.

I get it, but my blood was up and this was the annoying grain of sand in the sock of life. I thought: we as a species can send human beings to outer space. We created a COVID-19 vaccine within months when normally it takes years. For some reason people were coaxed into watching a Jake Paul and Mike Tyson boxing match.

How can we not create a gutter hanger that can be outside for a couple years without becoming brittle?

Can I get more permanent hangers? Yes, but I don’t want to screw more items into the side of the house. It seems like it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Says the guy still fuming about it a day after hanging the lights.

My larger point is it all just seems like too big of an effort some years, even though they do look kind of sharp when I’m coming home at night and yes, some days I do want to maybe add more, but I have to consider my sanity.

I’m already pretty good at creative cussing. Do I need to get better?