Christmas Lights

A few weeks ago I bought 100 feet of big Christmas lights, 500 small lights and 12 medium sized candy canes to decorate the front yard. My vision was simple -- big lights around the roof, little lights in the bushes and candy canes along the walk way. I knew this would be a bit of a challenge, at least getting them up along the roof since the gables (or peaks, whatever you want to call them) are so high. But I was determined to make Chip find a way! :) Then last week a lot of people in the neighborhood started putting their lights up, and I noticed that no one was attempting to get them up along the roof -- they were all using lawn stakes and outlining their yards and flowerbeds with lights. But I still wanted to try. We got a 12 foot poll at Lowes made specifically for attaching lights to rain gutters and shingles and had a 6 foot ladder -- this plus Chip's height of 6'3" was 24 feet tall and still way to short to reach the tip top of the roof. I was frustrated, but didn't want to kill Chip in an effort to have lights up. So we revised our plan. We decided to get the lawn lights in color and white lights for the bushes. This would look nice enough. So we headed to Lowes and returned what we had bough previously and got 180 feet worth of lights and lawn stakes. We also decided that the netted lights would be so much easier to decorate the bushes with -- but they only had colored lights left, so we figured that would be fine. Then we get home (it is dark now) and start to decorate. We began with the netted lights -- we had bought 7, but then realized you can only attached 3 together according to the safety directions. And they weren't all that large -- so we decided to not do all the bushes. The tall ones on the end would be light-less, it would just be easier that way. After we got the bushes lit, I realized that since our flower beds are not straight, outlining the yard with lights would probably look messy. Chip agreed. Plus according to the boxes of light we bought for the yard, you could only attach 2 strings together! This meant if we continued with our plan, we'd have 8 extension cords chris-crossing the yard. It was overwhelming. So, we changed out plan again. We took all the lights and stakes back to Lowes (thankfully they have a great and easy return policy) and bought 2 trees made of lights to put at the base of the walk way. By the time we got home it was after 8pm and we were exhausted from all the trips back and forth to Lowes. So hopefully, we'll get it completed today. It is nowhere near what I had envisioned the house looking like at Christmas, but it is good for now. We'll definitely have a better plan of attack for next year! Who would have thought this would have been such an issue for us??

We do have one decoration, already in place year round -- a holly tree!

This was in the beginning of the day, when we were still trying to find a way to get the lights on the roof

It is nearly impossible for me to take a good night picture, I seem to shake too much! But here you can kinda see the candy canes, the lights in the bushes and our tree in the window! That is my favorite part!! We got a 9 ft fake tree just for the front window!! I am still going to get my real tree and put it in the family room since we spend the most time there and will be able to enjoy it more! But this looks good from the street!

Still a work in progress as far as I am concerned!