Lighting The Darkness

I'm in the Christmas spirit this year, so I decided that we'd put up our outside lights. We've probably only done it maybe four times since we moved out of California eleven years ago. You have to get them up early, before the snow hits, because once there's snow, you just don't want to be up on the roof. Today was cold, but bright and sunny, so it was...well, not the perfect day, but as good a day as we were probably going to get.

It took a while to get all the stuff out of its box, and organized. We went through the strings of lights, found all the burned out bulbs, and replaced them. Eventually, we had something like three and a half working strings of lights.

My older son climbed up on the roof outside his bedroom window, and clipped one string on, and I opened our ladder up as big as it would go, to get to the roof outside my bedroom window.

We also put some garland and wreaths up on the porch, as well as taking a set of solar lights that we have for the yard, and attaching it to the garland.

In the end, I think it looks really good. It's nothing fancy, or out of control (like some of the houses in our neighborhood), but it's cheery and festive...and hey, we did it. That's way better than most years.

Sadly, by the time I got back from the grocery store tonight, several of the bulbs had already burned out. I'm gonna have to throw my son back out his window, to get those ones replaced.