The last time dad hung up the lights.

Ever since I was a kid my dad had always freaked when my brothers, or me, broke anything in the house. Whether we broke a spatula, or wrecked a car, his reaction was always the same.
'Jesus Christ! What the hell were you doing!' He'd always say in his thunderous voice.
So I was shocked at what he did that cold November day four years ago.
It was just after Thanksgiving, and my dad volunteered me to help him hang the Christmas lights on the outside of our house. Besides the fact that I hate Christmas lights, I hate having to do things with my dad, simply because there are no shortcuts with him, everything is done by the book.
Normally we hang our lights with plastic clips that clip onto the lip of the gutter, but when I came out of the house my dad was standing in our driveway pulling the clips off the strands of lights. I questioned him as to what he was doing, but his only reply was
“Trying to hang the Goddamn lights.”
I began to worry when he told me to get a hammer from the garage, I did as I was told, because there was no use arguing. I got the hammer as he leaned the ladder up against the side of the house. I handed him the hammer when he got to the top of the ladder, and then handed him the end of one of the strands of lights. I turned to watch the neighbors as they backed out of their driveway, but was shocked when I turned around to see what my dad was doing. He had pulled a large nail from his coat pocket and had slipped it between the two wires and had the hammer ready to send the nail into the siding. I couldn’t speak, hell, I almost pissed myself, and I could not believe what my dad was about to do.
With a quick tap the nail pierced the siding and it was too late. I thought he’d come to his senses and realize what he did, but he kept going. We reached the other side of the house, just above my parent’s bedroom window when we ran out of the strands of with lights, I told him we were out of lights but he didn’t believe me. He got off the ladder and rustled through the box on the driveway. He came back with a ten-foot long section of colored Christmas lights even though we only had six foot of house left. He climbed the ladder again and tacked the last string of lights to the house. Four feet of lights dangled from the end of the chain. He tacked those to the house parallel to the downspout.
It was a Christmas nightmare bad enough to make Rudolph puke, Frosty melt, and Santa reach for a beer. I ran inside and found my mom who was in the basement folding laundry and told her what her husband had done. I’d never seen my mom move that fast before she was upstairs and out the door before I could even flinch. I had barely made it to the front door before I heard my mom start to yell at him. I sat down at the kitchen table to contemplate what had just happened.
Later that day my brother Dan came over to see what dad had done, he laughed when I told him what happened as we took down the lights.
Dad was frustrated that none of us thought his display looked pretty. That was the last time mom let him put up Christmas lights.