Plastic pegs, decorating wives and drunk reindeer

The light timer is a magical invention.  Even outside of the Christmas season we have a couple timers that turn some of the lights on and off.   You can tell when my wife is home because every, literally, every light is on in the house.  She is single handedly trying to boost Georgia Powers annual profits.

So decorating for her during Christmas is a high point, both in enjoyment and watts used.   We put the tree up immediately after Thanksgiving.  In every corner, just out of the reach of a tiny, toddler hand is a nutcracker, figurine or wreath on the wall.  We used to have some reindeer that were all lit up, but I stopped giving them alcoholic drinks and now they’re fine.  I’m joking, we shot them and had reindeer for dinner. 

No really, they’re fine.  Actually they weren’t fine; they were broken and didn’t light up.   I toyed with the idea of fixing every reindeer light on their white metal body.  But then I realized the decorating vortex that my wife was goading me into and pretended that I didn’t speak English.* 

I took the reindeer to Goodwill so some other hapless dad can get sucked into the task of replacing one of the 8,000 lights on the animatronic mammal.  That was last year.  This year, confident in the fact that I didn’t have any fake drunk animals to place in the yard, I was content with simply putting up the Christmas tree and lights around the house.

However, Christmas does tax our timer resources.  How can the Mojo family, that normally uses multiple timers, accommodate the Christmas season with lit up (non alcoholic) wreathes, trees, as well as, the regular lights? 

In the spirit of Zack Morris** I shall now recreate an actual conversation between my wife and I.

 The set up:  My wife is looking at one of the timers, while I’m in the kitchen cleaning.

Wife:  Sweetie, have you seen the blue peg? 

(the blue peg is the other peg that is needed in order to set the on & off setting for the timer.  Without said peg, the timer is useless)

Man:  No, I haven’t

Wife:  You don’t think he (Baby Mojo) ate it do you?

Man:  No, I don’t think he ate it.

Wife:  (looking worried)  Do you think we’ll have to sort through his…….to look for it? 

At this point I wasn’t sure if my wife was worried about the fact that our son may have eaten a ¼ inch plastic peg or concerned about the fact that the light timer doesn’t work.  I looked deep inside and realized that she’s probably more concerned about the metal reindeer that we abandoned at Goodwill last year, closely followed by our child. 

For a moment I did think about us having to sort through his diapers, looking for a tiny blue plastic peg.  I was also thankful that it was a blue peg, not yellow and that we didn’t feed Baby Mojo corn the previous night.  Apparently after Christmas when the supplies go on sale I’ll be in line picking up a couple light timers for Christmas 2011.

*don’t try this, it didn’t work.

** Zack would speak directly to the camera.  When screen writers have their characters speak directly to the camera it’s a cop out.

*** Thankfully it’s not Cop Out the movie, which was a true stinker, even worse than this blog posting.