Traumas of X-mas

My biggest fear during Christmas as a child, I think proves my obsessive-compulsive, negative approach to life.

The week after Thanksgiving dad would always make sure the entire house was covered in lights - from top to bottom, sometimes inside but always out.

Being the "macho male I can take on anything" adrenalin junky that he is, dad would frequently "ask" us kids (in that parental "You are going to do this NOW and have FUN while doing it!!" type of way) to go up on the roof and help him put up all the lights.

Now, when I was younger I was afraid of heights (I would cry if dad left me alone while hiking up foot hills) and always think of the absolute worse possible scenario (I don't have nightmares at night. My imagination creates nightmares for me during the day). So year after year I would climb up to the top of the ladder that we would use to get onto the roof, and step onto our solidly built back porch. And year after year, as I stepped onto our intestinaly fortified back porch my mind would start racing:

"The porch isn't stable!! Prairie winds will take a hold of the porch, and since it's too weak for my support the wooden support beams right below my feet will snap in two and we'll all plummet to the earth and DIE!!!"

Yes, I was a dramatic child.

What's worse, my sadistic father would go out onto the attic roof on a cold, winter night saying "don't tell, mom, cause she'll get worried." (what a think to tell a dooms-day er thirteen year old daughter)

Of course, being the worse-possible-scenario-creator that I am I would think

"Great! Dad's gonna slip and die and I'll have to go tell mom that I was watching everything that happened, and mom will have to go to work instead of homeschooling us and then my older SISTER will home school us, and we frequently get into arguments, but it won't matter 'cause mom will ground me from eternity and I'll have nothing but school to do and be to starved for some sort of brain stimulation and socialization so that my older sister and I will become more than best friends but also enmeshed, just as grandma is worried about, and then I'll never leave home 'cause then I'll help home school and we'll all end up old poor maids in the middle of no-where!"

And all of this pain and agony JUST because we HAD to have Christmas lights on every single empty space on the outside of our house during Christmas!!

It didn't matter anyway because the stupid lights will all die in a year because they were probably imported from Japan who used slaves to make them, who didn't know anything about mechanics and are beaten and starved so the outcome of this slave labor is crapily built Christmas lights that die in less than a year but HAVE to be put onto every square inch of roof-top by obsessive compulsive adrenalin addicted fathers who have nothing better to do than scare their poor pre-teen daughters with their macho-ness by climbing onto attic overhangs JUST to hang up DUMB LIGHTS!!!!

Two years later I told my mom about the attic-roof top situation. Dad hasn't hung lights up there since.

And to think, this is all instigated by the "Spirit of Christmas"...

More like "The Goblin of Christmas," but "Whatever".