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Harley Hay: Another Christmas snowflake wrap

Warm enough for ya? That’s the kind of refrain we’re sometimes used to hearing in August – but November? Just to make this messed up world even more messed up, old Mother Nature seems to be on a bit of a topsy turvy tear these days. But like every dark and dirty cloud, there is always a silver – or at least light grey lining. And this year that lining is all lit up and multi-coloured like never before.
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Warm enough for ya? That’s the kind of refrain we’re sometimes used to hearing in August – but November? Just to make this messed up world even more messed up, old Mother Nature seems to be on a bit of a topsy turvy tear these days. But like every dark and dirty cloud, there is always a silver – or at least light grey lining. And this year that lining is all lit up and multi-coloured like never before.

Whether it’s because of COVID-19 that more people are at home and slightly depressed, combined with the unseasonably balmy October and November, it’s a happy fact that there are a lot more coloured lights, sparkling decorations and wobbling air-filled creatures filling our neighbourhoods right across our fair city this year.

I don’t want to brag or anything (yeah, sure) but our Edgington street is positively exploding with even more Christmas tidings of comfort and joy this year. The lovely ladies halfway down the street set the beauty bar pretty high indeed. Their blissfully bright and beautiful yard is always positively packed with incredible displays of seasonal awesomeness, and a few doors down the folks bring in a crane and hang a zillion lights in a towering birch tree every year. I see them up there in November, swaying around in a cherry picker bucket wrangling a kilometre-long string of lights, and I know Christmas is officially here.

So of course, this year I had to go out and snag another snowflake. A lit-up, shining decoration-type snowflake I mean, on account of we already had two snowflakes outside on each end of the house in and amongst the coloured lights and we figured we needed one on the inside of our kitchen window to balance things out. After all, we needed to up our anti several thousand candelas, which as you know, is the base measurement of luminous intensity.

And it was luminous intensity that caused the Better Half to kind of take a bit of an issue with my purchase. This would not be first time one of my creative choices didn’t make the grade, however this time, after carefully visiting several stores and finally deciding on the most special luminated snowflake, it turned out the flake was fortuitously fluorescent.

In fact when we plugged it in, it lit up and went practically nuclear in the kitchen, very nearly melting the paint off the walls and the vitreous right off our rentinas. Once we pulled the window blinds so that the snowflake shone mostly to the outside, I was fine with the resulting lesser laser-like intensity but the gaudy glowing glare gave the normally stalwart BH a rare ache of the head.

So before you can say “stupid snowflake” I was back outside with various ladders and tools and begrudging resolve, removing decorations that I had just recently installed, duly engaged in the act of swapping snowflakes.

As per her “suggestion,” after some effort involving a power drill and several unusable holes and several wrong-sized screws I finally remove the significantly less nuclear outdoor snowflake attached to the house beside the living room window featuring the BH’s incredible white Christmas tree, and replace it with the blazing one from the kitchen. The outdoor flake was then transferred back into the kitchen window.

And so we go out in the warmish dark to look back at the Christmas cheer glowing from our house and I’m quite pleased with myself. And then the Better Half quietly says, “Wouldn’t it be better if that really bright new snowflake was way over on the fence and the one on the fence was where the new snowflake is?”

Stupid snowflake.

Harley Hay is a Red Deer author and filmmaker. Send him a column idea to harleyhay1@hotmail.com.