A fine kick-off to Christmas

It's finally here, the Day After Thanksgiving! I love this day, because it is the day I get to stop feeling bad for listening to Christmas carols, get out my decorations, and go to town! I don't mean literally going to town, because the idea of being joining the hustle and bustle (i.e. frenzy) of shopping on this day makes me queasy.
But I love celebrating Christmas!
We started of this year's celebration by raking up all the dead leaves. We'd been waiting until the last leaf was off the trees so as to prevent the counterproductivity that comes with raking while leaves are still falling. While Kevin finished that up, I started putting up the Christmas lights on the house, which hadn't been done for a long time. I'll come back to that.
Now we have a ton of Christmas lights, because every year I either lose the bag of lights and have to buy more, or else I buy up a bunch when they're on sale after Christmas is over. What this means is that this year, since I've already bought some on sale and found all the ones I've lost over the years, we have millions (well, thousands) of Christmas lights. I also got some neat plastic clips that slide onto the shingles or roof drains (shingles in our case).
Our house (as I have mentioned several times before) is a cute little cottage in the middle of a big, open field. It was built in the 1930's, and the same little old lady lived in it up until recently. The neighbors tell us about how she was your typical old cat lady who gave candy to the kids, but they werere still scared to come to the house because it was all old and overgrown.
The house has undergone a major transformation, and now it is a cute little cottage that I new would look stellar decked in Christmas lights.
So I got out the ladder and started clipping lights up. I made Kevin do the highest part on the roof while I held the ladder for him. I carefully outlined the roof on the side, front, and little porch thingie of the house.
Now I've painted our house, including the trim of the roof and the entire porch thingie (although come to think of it, I used a step-stool and never actually looked inside it before). Well, today I looked inside.
There were a bunch of cobwebs covering the remains of an old porch light and a bag of something. It looked like a dead animal of some sort, but I remember poking and prodding it at some point last year and realizing it was a bag of something.
But wait! That was in the basement. I've never looked up here in the porch. And now that I'm looking at THIS bag of something, I'm realizing that it has a face with teeth poking out of its shriveled face and the remains of hair all over it.
I carefully, silently got down the ladder and then RAN over to Kevin yelling, "Glglhghglkkkkk!" and trying to shake imaginary cooties off of me.
"Kevin, there's a dead cat in the roof!"
Kevin got his rake and came to investigate. I made gagging noises again and told him how horrified I was that he was using a rake to get it out.
"How else do you expect me to get it out?"
I ignored him and ran to go get a shovel. This cat may be all dead and shriveled, but he still deserves a proper burial (or at least a hole in the ground). Once I realized the ground was too hard to dig, I ran inside for my camera.
You guys should be lucky I couldn't find it.
So we buried the cat in a pile of leaves in the ditch.
And our house looks beautiful for Christmas.
So merry Christmas, one and all! Maybe you could make a copy of this and send it out with your Christmas letter this year. Or print it out and keep it in your pile of O Henry Christmas stories.
Or just be sure to wear gloves when you put up your Christmas lights this year