Daley Ponderings

Last year, we were the only people on our street without outside Christmas decorations, and most neighbors had nice decorations, and so I wanted to not be the dark house on the street, so we looked around for something appropriate.  (no animated Santas, etc.)  Though, I did see this picture after deciding what we were going to get.

I could be up for that, and we have a good commuting road that would be ideal for it.

I grew up with simple candles in the windows, and so I wanted to do that. However, I couldn't find any at a couple stores that we went to, and I bought some at Target, and half of them were broken (internal wiring issue, not the bulb) out of the box, and so I figured the other ones would be breaking shortly.

I do have two candles from my parents when they had extra, and when I used them in college, so we have those placed on the side windows. In the bay window (actually outside the window, on the porch, but we can see it from inside and outside), we have our tiny (1 foot tall or so) plastic tree with white lights.  And then we have a couple string of regular Christmas tree lights doing the border of the porch, and I think it looks pretty nice.  I'll have to take a picture of it at some point.

The boys and I spent a couple hours replacing lightbulbs when we first got it out, since there were a lot of bulbs/wiring broken in the string (so much so that the whole string was out).  And then we have our year round Christmas lights (carrying on Volus' tradition from the Joyful Noise Boyz House) in the living room and dining room.

The lights cost around $.01/hour to operate, and most of them are on a timer for 5 hours a day.

As far as this being a "product review", I guess the answer is - get the old kind, as they are still working, and all of the new stuff is junk.  I bought Jonathan a string of "unbreakable" lights a year or two ago, and they have been destroyed, causing sparks that looked fairly dangerous, so we threw the string away.