Notes From a Big Country by Bill Bryson

Author:Bill Bryson [Bryson, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: United States, Customs & Traditions, Social Science
ISBN: 9780552997867
Publisher: Black Swan
Published: 1999-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

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And it has left me with the profoundest joy and gratitude

DECK THE HALLS

When I left you last time, I was expressing a certain queasy foreboding at the thought that at any moment my wife would step into the room and announce that the time has come to get out the Christmas decorations.

Well, here we are, another week gone and just eighteen fleeting days till Christmas, and still not a peep from her. I don't know how much more of this I can take.

I hate doing the Christmas decorations because, for a start, it means going up into the attic. Attics are, of course, dirty, dark, disagreeable places. You always find things up there you don't want to find-lengths of ominously gnawed wiring, gaps in the roof through which you can see daylight and sometimes even poke your head, boxes full of useless odds and ends that you must have been out of your mind ever to have hauled up there. Three things alone are certain when you venture into the attic: that you will crack your head on a beam at least twice, that you will get cobwebs draped lavishly over your face, and that you will not find what you went looking for.

When I was growing up, my friend Bobby Hansen had a secret stairway in a closet leading up to the attic, which I thought was the classiest thing ever. I still do, come to think of it, particularly as our house in New

Hampshire, like all the other houses I have ever lived in, offers access to the attic only through a hatch in the ceiling, which means you have to get a stepladder out each time you want to go up there.

Now the thing about putting a stepladder directly beneath an open attic hatch, I find, is that when it comes time to go back down you discover that the ladder has mysteriously moved about four feet toward the top of the hall stairs.

I don't know how this happens, but it always does.

In consequence, you have to lower your legs through the hatch and blindly grope for the ladder with your feet. If you stretch your right leg to its farthest extremity, you can just about get a toe to it, but no more.

Eventually, you discover that if you swing your legs back and forth, rather like a gymnast on parallel bars, you can get one foot on top of the ladder, and then both feet on. This, however, does not represent a great breakthrough because you are now lying at an angle of about sixty degrees and unable to make any further progress. Grunting softly, you try to drag the ladder nearer with your feet but succeed only in knocking it over with an alarming crash.

Now you really are stuck. You try to wriggle back up into the attic, but you haven't the strength, so you hang by your armpits. Plaintively, you call to your wife, but she doesn't hear you, which is not just discouraging but inexplicable.

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