Now that our youngest is able to walk around the house and collect little treasures, Christmas decorating has become a daily routine.  The Advent calendar that my wife bought for the kids is a bare Nativity scene with the little Velcro figures (Olivia calls them “cookies”) spread throughout the house and our Christmas tree, which was once beautifully decorated, is now bare to a height of about 3 feet as the ornaments have slowly migrated up the tree and out of the reach of curious hands.

Of course the actual day of decorating had its usual stresses and blunders.  It literally took about ten trips to the basement to bring up all the decorations – it looked like we were getting ready to move again once everything was upstairs.  Then we got to work on the ginormous 10 foot artificial tree that takes about three weeks to put together with the help of a construction crane.

After completing the tree, I took the empty boxes back downstairs while Sara got to work on the outdoor lights.  We’re not the Grizwalds, but we have a decent amount of exterior illumination and Sara actually enjoys putting the lights up.  I have no problem letting her run with that…

After getting the empty boxes (and a few  boxes of decorations that we never use, but I always carry upstairs, unpack, repack, and take back downstairs) back in the basement, I went out to check on Sara’s progress.  She proudly showed me the routing of her lighting around trees, shrubs, porch rails, columns, and flag poles leading all the way up to the electrical socket on the porch where she held up the wrong end of the plug and asked me if we had an adapter so she could plug it in.  Yep, she started way out in the yard with the end that it supposed to go into the wall and ran the whole thing backwards.

I gave her that look that every husband has given and every wife recognizes.  She still didn’t get it…

I don’t mean to belittle Sara – I’m sure many of you have made this same error and at least she was out there putting up the lights, but there is a good lesson here.  No matter how creatively Sara put up the lights, no matter how good they looked, how hard she worked, or how good her intentions, her plan would fail because she started with the wrong end.  Sometimes we realize that we started in the wrong place and try to correct it by working harder, rationalizing, or simply ignoring our error when what we really need to do is go back to the beginning and look at how our endeavor began.  With Christmas lights, the fix is pretty simple.  With careers, relationships, and life priorities, the required correction can be intimidating, but it is necessary if we want our lives to light up.