Louise T. Guinther

Some people travel far and wide in search of natural wonders, great adventures or extreme sports to challenge their bodies, souls and nerve. I have only to travel a few steps outside my front door to find all these things in the annual trimming of our outdoor Christmas tree. Said “tree” is actually an overgrown yew bush that long ago shot up out of the reach of our tallest ladder, a brilliant multifarious affair that extends to a maximum height of X feet. It was a gift from two of my best friends, and you wouldn’t think there could be a job too tall for it, but the illumination of the holiday shrub has it beat.

The last time I tried to prune off the top of the bush — at least a decade and a half ago — I had to go out the second-floor window and onto the sunporch roof to do it. Alas, that made my mother too nervous and the cat too curious (he boldly followed me out the window), so I have not attempted it since. The tree now resembles the corno ducal (literally the duke’s horn), a unique sort of crown worn by the doge of Venice. In fact, we often refer to our ewe affectionately as the doge’s hat. Its upper extension can’t be reached and won’t be lit again until someone invents a hover craft that allows me to float about two stories above the ground. My friend Jim often suggests that if we could remove that top section, it would make a good Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

Of course that is largely exaggeration, but the fact remains that the lighting of our outdoor Christmas tree poses a monumental challenge, a sort of Advent-season Olympic trial for me to get through before the warm, cozy celebrations begin. Despite my best intentions to think ahead and pick a nice temperate day in, say, mid-November to get the thing up and running, I always end up tackling the project on the coldest day (or days) of the year, adding frostbite to the list of risks to life and limb.

Part of the complication of it all is my own folly: several years back, I went down to the basement to fetch the bag of twinkly lights and was puzzled not to find them anywhere on the Christmas storage shelf. After much searching, I thought of one place they might be, and sure enough, there they were — still on the bush from the previous year. I had never gotten around to taking them down. To my astonishment, they still lit up when I plugged them in — a classic example of positive reinforcement for bad behavior. It was the easiest tree-decorating ever, though it was necessary to prune the bush around the lights a bit as they were now somewhat invisible behind the ever-growing branches. For several years, being lazy and leaving the lights out all year made my life easier, though in the course of pruning, I would inevitably snip one or two wires and have to either splice or sneak in a whole new string of lights where I had cut the cord.

As the years have passed and the tree grew, however, more and more light strings have bitten the dust, and the tangled spider web is now so convoluted and impenetrable it would take Sleeping Beauty’s Prince Charming to remove it. So out I go every year with two or three ladders of various heights, a collection of clippers and a pair of medical-supply grabbers my mother used to pull up her socks after she broke her hip to try to fill in the gaps and make my contribution to the Exeter Street winter wonderland..

It’s actually kind of fun to be up in the stratosphere communing with nature and the spirit of Christmas (which has to be very strong to inspire such folly). I have developed a very friendly relationship with the bush, which periodically holds me up and rescues me from disaster when the ladder shifts or I reach for too distant a branch. My sister stands below, steadying the ladder and handing up clippers, grabbers and more and more strings of lights while exhorting me not to lean over so far, or begging me to come down and leave it the way it is. This year, when I had achieved a particularly haphazard and splotchy effect, she suggested that I stop and sign it “Jackson Pollock.”

Some day soon, I will be too old to climb and too worried about osteoporosis for it to be worth the risk. But for now, I still enjoy the exhilaration of perching up close to the sky, where the air is particularly crisp and the passersby are so focused on the world at ground level that they don’t even know I’m up there spying on them. It isn’t really an extreme sport, but the sense of accomplishment and the adrenaline high I get when it is all finally ready to spread a little Christmas joy is probably the closest I’ll ever get to climbing Mount Everest,