The Christmas Lights War That Made Friends

My husband Orville has hung the same nine strands of lights on the same three bushes for forty years, and until last November, that was plenty. We live on Birch Street in Ashford, Wisconsin, population 2,900 if you count the Petersons twice because they’re both stubborn enough to count as a household of one each. Orville is seventy-three. I am seventy. We have been married forty-two years, and in all that time I never once heard him raise his voice about a strand of lights, a length of gutter, or anything else you could buy at the Ashford Farm and Fleet for under twenty dollars.

Then Otho Reinke moved in across the street, and I watched my husband turn into a man I did not entirely recognize, in the funniest, sweetest, most Orville way possible.

Otho was seventy-one, a widower, freshly moved up from Green Bay to be closer to his daughter Deb, who lives two streets over on Larkspur with her husband and their twin boys. His wife Beverly had died the previous March, and by September he was standing in the driveway of the old Hutchins place with a moving truck and a look on his face like a man who had run out of reasons to say no to things. He was quiet at first. Polite in the way of a man raised to say “much obliged” and mean it. He waved at Orville over the hedge the day he moved in, and Orville waved back, and that, I assumed, would be the extent of their relationship. Two old men, two lawns, a friendly nod at the mailbox twice a week. Fine by me. Orville has never needed more than one close friend at a time, and that friend has been Duane Kowalczyk down at the VFW post for going on fifty years.

I did not know then that Otho Reinke would end up closer to Orville than Duane ever was. I did not know a lot of things that fall. Mostly I did not know that my husband, a man who reads the newspaper obituaries before the sports page because he says it’s more efficient grief management, had a competitive streak buried under all that Wisconsin politeness, and that it would take exactly one string of icicle lights to dig it up.

The trouble started the Sunday after Thanksgiving, at coffee hour after the second service at First Lutheran. Maybelle Anders, who has never in her life said an unkind word about anybody and does not know how to keep her opinions to herself either, was going on about how the new fellow across from us, “the widower, Otho,” had already gotten his lights up and they were, in her words, “just lovely, very tasteful, very put-together.” She said it three times. Tasteful. Put-together. I watched Orville’s jaw work around a ginger snap like he was chewing on something a good deal tougher than a cookie.

“Tasteful,” he repeated in the truck on the way home, like the word had personally wronged him.

I want to be clear that our own lights, up to that point, were fine. Nine strands, warm white, wound around the three arborvitae out front the way Orville’s father had done it on their farm outside Chilton, and the way Orville had done it every year of our marriage. It looked like Christmas. It did not look like a competition. I liked it that way.

Orville did not say another word about it that day. But Monday morning I found him in the garage with the Rubbermaid tote of lights open on the workbench, testing every strand bulb by bulb, muttering about which ones had “given up the ghost.” By Wednesday he had driven to the Farm and Fleet in Chilton, the good one, twenty-six miles round trip, and come home with four new boxes of net lights, a spool of extension cord, and a plastic light-up sleigh that took up the entire truck bed.

“For the yard,” he said, like that explained the sleigh.

Across the street, Otho’s display really was lovely. I’ll give Maybelle Anders that much. He had strung the porch rail in warm white with a careful, even hand, wrapped the two young maples out front in spirals so tight and tidy you’d think he’d used a level, and set a simple wooden nativity, hand-built, on the lawn under a single spotlight. Nothing flashy. Nothing that blinked. It looked like something out of a Christmas card, and it looked like it had been made by a man who missed doing this with somebody, which, I would later learn, was exactly the truth of it.

Orville stood at our front window on Thursday evening with his coffee, looking at it, and said, “It’s not that good.”

It was that good. We both knew it. That was the whole problem.

By the second week of December, what had started as Orville quietly restringing our arborvitae had become, in the parlance of our grandson Tucker, an arms race. Orville added the sleigh. Otho, three days later, added two more spotlights and a hand-lettered sign that said PEACE, which Orville took as a direct shot, though I promise you it was not. Orville bought a light-up Santa that stood eight feet tall and had a motor in it that made the arm wave, which cost him ninety-four dollars and required its own extension cord run clear from the garage outlet. Otho, not to be outdone, though I don’t believe for one second he understood he was in a contest at all, simply added a second, matching nativity scene of shepherds off to one side, which somehow looked even better and made Orville’s waving Santa look, in Orville’s own words, “a little desperate.”

That was when our granddaughter Callie got involved.

Callie is sixteen and has strong opinions about aesthetics, gained I assume from the two years she spent obsessed with a home renovation show, and she took one look at our yard, then at Otho’s, and declared that we needed “a theme.” Orville, who I do not think had ever used the word theme in a sentence in his life, latched onto this like a drowning man to a life ring. Callie’s theme was the Twelve Days of Christmas, twelve separate lighted displays running the length of our property line, each one representing a verse, built out of a combination of store-bought decorations and, increasingly, things Orville built himself in the garage out of plywood and PVC pipe he did not, strictly speaking, know how to work with.

I want you to understand the scale of this. By December fifteenth, our front yard had, among other things: two turtle doves made from repurposed garden urns and craft-store feathers, five golden rings fashioned from hula hoops spray-painted gold and hung between the porch posts, and a set of eight maids a-milking that Orville built out of pool noodles, broom handles, and, I am not exaggerating, my late mother’s old milking stool, which he dug out of the barn without asking me and which I did not get back until January and which, frankly, I am still a little sore about.

Across the street, Otho did not add a single new piece.

What Otho did instead, without meaning to, without even trying, was outshine every single thing we did through sheer restraint. Where our yard blazed like the Ashford county fairgrounds during the demolition derby, his stayed soft, warm, still. People slowed their cars for both yards, but I noticed, and I think Orville noticed too though he’d never admit it, that the cars in front of Otho’s house stopped for longer. They rolled the windows down. They got quiet.

It was Duane Kowalczyk, of all people, who poured gasoline on the whole thing, at coffee at the Wagon Wheel Diner on a Tuesday morning, by mentioning that the Ashford Area Chamber of Commerce was running its annual Light Up Ashford contest again this year, first prize a two-hundred-dollar gift certificate to the Wagon Wheel itself, judging on the evening of December nineteenth, entries due by the seventeenth.

Orville signed us up that afternoon. I found out he’d signed up Otho too, on Otho’s behalf, without asking him, when the confirmation postcard came addressed to “Otho Reinke, care of Orville Kessler.” When I asked him why on earth he’d entered a man he barely knew into a contest against himself, Orville got a funny, sheepish look and said, “A man works that hard on a display, he ought to get judged for it. Seemed only fair.”

That was the moment I understood something Orville himself likely didn’t yet: this was never really about beating Otho. This was about Orville having somebody worth competing with for the first time in years. Duane loves him, but Duane’s idea of a challenge is whether the Packers cover the spread. Orville needed a rival the way some men need a fishing buddy, and he’d apparently decided, somewhere between the maids a-milking and the golden rings, that Otho Reinke was going to be it, whether Otho had agreed to the arrangement or not.

I should explain something about Orville that his obituary-reading habits don’t quite capture. He retired six years ago from thirty-one years teaching shop class at Ashford High, and he has never once, in retirement, found a hobby that fit him the way that classroom did. He tried woodworking on his own and got bored without students to correct. He tried the Ashford Men’s Bowling League and quit after a season because, in his words, “nobody there wants to talk about anything but bowling.” What Orville has always needed, and what I don’t think either of us understood until that December, was a project with another person attached to it, somebody to show off for, somebody whose opinion of the work actually mattered to him. For six years he hadn’t had that. Then a widower moved in across the street with a string of icicle lights and, without either of them intending it, gave it back to him.

Callie noticed it too, in the blunt way sixteen-year-olds notice everything about the adults around them and say it right out loud without softening it first. “Grandpa’s happier since the light thing started,” she told me one evening, sitting cross-legged on our living room floor gluing feathers onto a garden urn while the television played some renovation show in the background. “He used to just watch the news and complain about it. Now he’s got a whole plan.” She was right, and I hadn’t wanted to say it myself, because saying it out loud felt like admitting how much I’d worried, quietly, those six retired years, about a man who needed more than crossword puzzles and Duane’s fishing stories to feel like himself.

Otho, for his part, took the postcard from Orville with a bemused sort of grace, the way you’d accept an invitation to a party you weren’t sure you wanted to attend but didn’t have the heart to decline. “Well,” he said, standing in his driveway in his barn coat, looking across at our yard, which by then had grown to include a partridge made from an actual pear tree Orville had bought at the nursery and strung with two hundred lights, “I suppose I’d better not embarrass myself.”

He did not embarrass himself. Over the next four days, working alone in the cold in the evenings after his shift helping out part time at the hardware store in town, Otho added, one careful piece at a time, a full sleigh-and-reindeer scene built from wood he’d cut and sanded and painted himself, each reindeer a slightly different size the way real deer would be, with the littlest one, the fawn, tucked in close behind its mother. It was, by any honest measure, the finest thing on Birch Street, possibly the finest thing in Ashford, and Orville drove past it slow every single night on his way home from the VFW, jaw set, silent.

The whole town had opinions by then. The Ashford Happenings Facebook group, which I am on because Callie set it up for me and which I mostly use to see who’s selling what at rummage sales, ran an unofficial poll: Team Kessler versus Team Reinke. It topped four hundred votes, which in a town our size is essentially the entire population plus a few relatives from Fond du Lac who’d seen the pictures. Otho was winning fifty-eight to forty-two the last time I checked, and Orville checked it more than he’d ever admit, hunched over Callie’s old tablet at the kitchen table with his readers pushed down his nose, saying “well, that’s not scientific” every time the number ticked up for Otho.

The Wagon Wheel Diner turned it into a running bit, chalking a little scoreboard on the specials board by the register, KESSLER versus REINKE, updated whenever somebody new weighed in over eggs and coffee. Pastor Halvorsen worked a gentle joke about it into the announcements one Sunday, something about how it was nice to see the men of Birch Street finding the Christmas spirit so competitively, which got a bigger laugh than anything in his actual sermon and which Orville pretended not to hear while turning faintly pink in the pew. Even the mail carrier, a patient young woman named Sherry who has delivered our route for eleven years, started timing her stop on Birch Street to catch both displays lit at dusk, and told me once, leaning out her little truck window, that she looked forward to our block more than any other stretch of her whole route, that most days it was the best part of her afternoon.

Otho’s daughter Deb, for her part, was mortified in exactly the way a grown daughter gets mortified watching her seventy-one-year-old father behave like a teenager. She stopped by one evening in early December, ostensibly to drop off a casserole, and stood on the sidewalk between the two yards with her hands on her hips looking at her father’s tidy, careful nativity and then across at Orville’s exploding twelve-verse fever dream, and said, loud enough for both men to hear from their respective porches, “Dad. You are seventy-one years old.” Otho, without looking up from the reindeer he was sanding, said, “So’s the fella across the street, and he’s winning,” which was, at that point in December, not even true, but which Deb repeated to half the town anyway because it made her laugh so hard she had to sit down on our porch steps.

By December eighteenth, the night before judging, both yards were finished, and both yards were, honestly, something. Ours was loud and bright and a little bit absurd and entirely, wonderfully Orville, forty years of quiet tradition dialed up to a volume neither of us had known he had in him. Otho’s was quiet and precise and full of a grief he’d turned, piece by careful piece, into something beautiful instead of something that just sat in him. I stood at our window that night with my coffee, looking at both of them lit up against the snow, and I thought, not for the first time that season, that I had never in my life seen two more different men trying so hard to say the exact same thing, which was: I am still here, and I still know how to make something good.

The weather service had been talking about the cold snap for days, but nobody in Wisconsin takes a weather warning seriously until the truck won’t turn over, and ours turned over just fine the morning of the nineteenth, so I confess we did not think much of it. By four in the afternoon the sky had gone that hard, flat blue-white that means business, and by seven, when the Chamber judges were due to drive the block, it was nineteen below zero with a windchill that put it closer to negative forty, cold enough that Orville made me put my coat on over my bathrobe just to walk to the mailbox.

Both yards blazed on. Orville had rigged our display across four different extension cords, all four running back to the same outlet on the side of the garage, an outlet that, I would learn that night, had been wired by Orville’s father in nineteen sixty-one and had not been touched since. Otho’s display, more modest in its power draw but still substantial with all those spotlights, ran off the same transformer pole that fed our side of the block, the old one at the corner of Birch and Third that the utility company had been meaning to replace for going on a decade.

At 7:40, four minutes before the judges’ car was due to turn onto Birch Street, everything went dark.

Not just our yard. Not just Otho’s. The whole block, six houses, every porch light and every string of lights and every window lamp, gone at once, plunged into a cold so complete you could hear it, that particular ringing silence that comes with real Wisconsin cold and no hum of electricity to soften it. Somewhere down the street a dog started barking at nothing. Orville came tearing out the front door in his stocking feet, took one look at the dead, black yard he’d spent three weeks building, and said a word I will not repeat here, even though I understood exactly how he felt.

Otho was already out on his porch when I looked over, standing very still in the dark and the cold, looking at his own ruined display, and for one terrible second, before anybody moved, I thought: this is it, this is the year two old men on Birch Street finally have an actual fight over something. I braced for it.

Instead, Otho came down his porch steps in his slippers, walked straight across the frozen street without a coat, and said the first words I ever heard him speak that carried real urgency: “Orville, is your breaker box in the garage?”

Orville, still sputtering about the judges’ car, said yes.

“Show me. Now. Before you touch anything else.”

It turned out, and I did not learn this until later that night, huddled in blankets at our kitchen table with both men and three flashlights and a thermos of coffee I kept refilling, that Otho Reinke had not spent his working life doing what any of us assumed. Deb had told people he’d “worked in construction up in Green Bay,” which was true the way saying Orville “worked with cattle” is true of a man who ran a two-hundred-head dairy operation for thirty years. What Otho had actually run, for twenty-six years, was Reinke Electric, a licensed contracting outfit that wired half the new construction in Brown County before he sold it and retired. He knew the moment he saw sparks jump at the garage outlet, in the half second before the whole block’s breaker tripped at the pole, exactly what he was looking at, because he’d seen it a hundred times in sixty-year-old farmhouses just like ours: aluminum wiring, original to the house, never upgraded, asked over four decades to carry a load it was built for a fraction of, and that night asked to carry four extension cords’ worth of a light display in weather cold enough to make old wire brittle and connections loose. It hadn’t just tripped a breaker. It had started to arc, right there behind the wall, in the dark, in a house with two people sleeping in it every night for forty-two years.

“Another winter, maybe two,” Otho said quietly, kneeling by our breaker box with a flashlight in his teeth and his bare hands going white from the cold, working fast and sure in a way that told me this was not the first emergency he’d ever handled in weather like this. “That connection lets go behind the drywall instead of at the outlet, you don’t get a tripped breaker. You get a fire. Probably while you’re asleep.”

Orville did not say anything for a long moment. Then he said, “Well,” which is what Orville says when the ground has truly shifted under him and he needs a second to find his feet again.

We lost the contest that night, obviously. The judges’ car crept down a dark Birch Street at 7:52, saw six houses gone black in unison, and moved on to Cypress Lane, where the Millers’ inflatable Rudolph took first place, a fact Orville has still not fully forgiven Rudolph for. But nobody in our house or across the street cared one bit by then. Otho worked until nearly midnight, first making the box safe so it wouldn’t reignite, then coming back the next morning with proper tools and, over Orville’s protests about paying him, refusing every dollar, rewiring that entire circuit himself, running new copper the whole way from the box to the outlet, testing every connection twice.

While he worked, he talked, more than I’d heard him talk in the three months since he’d moved in. He told us about Beverly, about how she used to make him put the lights up the day after Thanksgiving without fail, thirty-one years running, and how the nativity in his yard was the same one he’d built her their first Christmas married, back when they had no money and he was an apprentice electrician with a jigsaw and more ambition than sense. He told us he’d almost not put lights up at all this year, that Deb had practically begged him to, worried about him alone in that house with nothing to do and nobody to do it for, and that somewhere around the third week of watching Orville escalate across the street, he’d realized he was having more fun than he’d had in the two years since Beverly got sick, because for the first time since her funeral, somebody was paying attention to him, even if that somebody was just trying to beat him.

“I wasn’t trying to beat you,” Orville said, which was, generously, only about seventy percent true, and Otho laughed so hard at that he had to set down his wire strippers.

“Orville,” he said, “your yard has eight men made of pool noodles milking imaginary cows. I know exactly what you were trying to do.”

We had the wiring fixed by noon on the twentieth, done right, done safe, at a cost of exactly zero dollars because Otho would not hear otherwise, though Orville did manage to sneak a case of good beer and a rack of ribs from the Wagon Wheel onto his porch that evening, which felt, between the two of them, like an even trade.

Word got around Ashford fast, the way it always does in a town small enough that the diner has a chalkboard scoreboard for a Christmas lights rivalry. By the time the Chamber posted its official results two days later, giving the Millers their Rudolph trophy, half the comments underneath weren’t about Rudolph at all. They were about the outage on Birch Street, and about Otho, and about what he’d found behind that garage wall. Sherry the mail carrier told me she’d had three different customers on her route ask her, in the space of one week, whether they ought to have somebody look at their own old wiring before next winter. Pastor Halvorsen mentioned it again from the pulpit, this time without the joke, just a quiet word of thanks for a neighbor who’d looked out for another neighbor on the coldest night of the year, and I noticed Otho staring hard at the hymnal in his lap the whole time, the way a man does when he’s not quite ready to be thanked out loud for something that still felt, to him, like just doing what anybody would do.

What happened after that is the part I actually want you to remember, more than the lights, more than the contest, more than the pool-noodle maids a-milking that Callie still brings up every single Thanksgiving. Orville and Otho started having coffee together most mornings, at our kitchen table or his, taking turns. Orville taught Otho how to ice fish out on Lake Winnebago, badly at first, and by February Otho had out-fished him twice, which Orville complained about with an obvious, undisguised delight I hadn’t seen in him in years. Otho started coming to the VFW post with Orville and Duane on Friday nights, and Duane, who I worried might feel replaced, instead declared Otho “sound,” which from Duane is closer to a knighthood than a compliment. When Otho’s daughter Deb had her second baby that spring, Orville was the one who drove Otho to the hospital in Appleton at three in the morning because Otho’s hands were shaking too hard to trust himself on the icy roads, and he sat with him in that waiting room for six hours until word came that everybody was fine.

The next December, the two of them did not compete. They combined. One yard, both properties, a single connected display strung across Birch Street itself with the town’s permission, wired properly this time by a man who knew exactly what he was doing, with Otho’s careful nativity as the quiet center of it and Orville’s absurd, glorious pool-noodle maids a-milking standing proud right alongside it, because Otho had insisted the maids stay, said any display without them would be missing its best joke. They entered the Chamber contest together, under the name “Birch Street,” and they won, and when the two hundred dollars came, neither man would keep a dime of it. They split it as a donation to the Ashford Food Pantry, in memory, the little card they mailed in said, of Beverly Reinke, who taught one stubborn old widower how to love Christmas in the first place, and who without ever meeting him, taught the other one something too.

I still catch the two of them some evenings, out on the sidewalk between our two houses in the cold, standing with their hands in their coat pockets, looking up at all those lights they built together, not saying much of anything, the way men who’ve become truly easy with each other don’t have to. Forty-two years I’ve been married to Orville Kessler, and I did not think, at seventy years old, I’d get to watch him make a brand new best friend, right there across Birch Street, over a string of lights and a blown fuse on the coldest night of the year. But I did. And every December since, when Otho crosses that street with his toolbox just to check our wiring before the season starts, just to be sure, I think about how close we came to losing something we never knew we needed, and how grateful I am that the lights went out at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right year, on exactly the right street.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.