Silver Bells, Red Candy Canes, and Giant Inflatable Penguins

Our Christmas lights are now mostly outside the house. We’re slowly adding to the collection as episodes as Dora provide babysitting.

Our walkway is lined with snowman solar lights. They look good during the day while they charge, and fantastic when the sun goes down and they illuminate an exquisite crackled glass globe at the base of each light. They look pretty crummy an hour after dusk when they’ve lost their charge and they all go dark.

We have a giant inflatable penguin. He was impressive until I tripped over one of the stakes keeping him attached to the ground, ripping the cord from his body. Now he’s a lifeless lump of fabric until I figure out how to reattach his stake.

I outlined a bit of our landscaping with a rope light. That adds class, plus it’ll help illuminate the giant inflatable penguin when he’s back up.

We have candy cane lights lining a front wall. Those look neat, although they’re floppy. They’re held into the ground by a stake on their base, and it turns out that stakes on a flimsy plastic candy cane are really hard to push into the ground when the ground freezes around the holiday season.

Our centerpiece is the 20-foot evergreen in our front yard that we lighted using a ladder, a long pole, and a lot of curse words. The kids noticed it the first night we turned on the lights.



They all took turns running up to the window. When Abbie saw the lights, she named the color pattern. “Red, green, orange, blue, red, green, orange, blue, red…” That tree was hard to decorate this year, and it’s only going to get harder when it becomes a 25-foot tree, and then a 30-foot tree, and so on. Hopefully by then the kids will be able to entertain themselves while mommy and daddy fiddle with the lights, or at least able to watch an entire Disney movie to give a little time to work.