Christmastime – Injuries

Setting the Trap

In my previous Christmastime post, I noted that Carol of the Bells is one of my favorite songs. I think my love of the song was due in part to its appearance in “Setting the Trap,” from the Home Alone soundtrack by John Williams. The piece includes bits from multiple Christmas songs, but Carol of the Bells is the most noticeable and makes it awesome. I’m sure I also enjoyed it when it was played by the bell choir in the church we used to attend before we moved to the house that was built for Christmas.

Injuries

As you may have already deduced from the fact that we wired our house for it, my family takes Christmas decorations seriously. This dedication is so deep, that it has resulted in multiple decorating injuries. I’ve been mildly electrocuted a couple of times working with the electric candles (when I was young… it made my arm feel like jelly and was scary. I don’t think my parents even know about this), but my dad has been hit the hardest.

At the bottom of our driveway in the second house I lived in, we had an evergreen tree. I don’t know what kind it was, but it looked like a Christmas tree. One year, we started putting lights on it. The tree kept growing, but this was easily handled by simply adding more lights. After a while, it became so tall that getting the lights on the top of the tree became a challenge. It outgrew the stepladder (which if I recall correctly is nine or ten feet in height), which required my dad to find a more creative way of getting to the top. Let’s just say that his solution involved two ladders. I was standing there holding a wad of lights, helping to hold the slack as he was working on the upper part of the tree, when I saw the great fall. I can’t visualize it anymore in my memory, but I do remember it being one of those (fortunately rare) moments in life where I was ready to call 911. He suffered a sprained wrist and spent that Christmas with his arm in a sling.

A few years ago, while I was away at school, my dad, who is still not afraid of ladders, started hanging a wreath above the fireplace in our dining room. There’s a picture of it (from a less eventful year) at the top of this post, taken from the second floor. Minutes later, he was on the floor with a shattered heel. He spent that Christmas with a cast and crutches, but has since recovered and even skied on the foot.

2nd in a series of Christmasy things.