Things Our Kids Teach Me and Christmas Lights Debacle

Hi everyone, sorry for the absence, the holidays have been more hectic than I'd anticipated and time seems to slip by quickly.

Okay, this is ten days after the fact, but still a great story, and yet another example of the things kids can teach you. We thought that since R's parents were coming, maybe we'd be a little more festive this year and put up Christmas lights, which I am a big fan of, but have never taken the initiative. Just not important enough to make it onto my radar.

Well, A kept insisting that it would be a good idea, so we decided to go for it. The ideal situation would have been to have decorated the big fir (spruce?) in the middle island, but to do it right would have required a cherry-picker, it's huge. Easily about 30 feet tall. A wanted us to decorate the tree, of course, and I told her, "No way." It was too tall, and would have required way too many lights.

She countered with our favorite parental adage, "It's worth a try before you give in." How could I argue with that?

Problem number one, however, was to find the lights. There was a sale at Aubuchon on traditional multi-colored lights, ceramic C7 bulbs I learned. I bought five boxes/sets at 25 bulbs per set, figuring that would give good pretty good coverage for the tree, though I'd heard from our neighbor that they covered their tree with over 350 lights, and it was much smaller than ours. For the record, their tree looks fabulous. I bought out Aubuchon, so they had none left.

Anyway, now the problem came up with how to put them on. As you can imagine, I don't have access to a cherry picker. So I rigged up our roof rake with a bent coat hanger and then went to work. It actually wasn't that bad, though I ended up short on the lights. I only managed to cover about half the tree, and figured that with better positioning and two more strings of lights, it would look nice. So I decided to seek out two more strands, but little did I know what a debacle I was about to experience. What a bummer.

You see, it turns out that I had chosen one of the most popular lights, and everywhere I went, they were sold out. On Monday, I dropped the kids off at pottery and then drove to consumer hell and checked Kmart, Walmart, and Home Depot. They were all sold out of C7 lights. Can you believe that? I picked up the kids and went home, dejected.

I told the kids that we might be out of luck, but then the light bulb went off in my head (no pun intended). Duh, get them online. Sure enough, I found them. They were a little more expensive than I'd hoped for, but reasonable, so I ordered them and crossed my fingers that they'd get here before R's folks arrived.

More on this later. Until then, thanks for reading, and thanks to peejay for the pic.


finally found on web