Deck The House With Lights And Duct Tape...

Until this year, Nathan & I have been an "indoor Christmas lights ONLY" kind of family. We always decorate the tree with lights, of course, and we usually have some small white lights framing our Nativity set. But for the first half of our married life, we lived in apartments--and when we moved to Sahuarita in 2008, we lived in a rental house for a few years and didn't want to bother with outdoor lights.

But now we have our own house, and that brings with it possibilities! Better yet, earlier this year my parents bequeathed us several rolls of white icicle lights they no longer needed--a "starter kit," as it were. Suddenly, decorating our house with beautiful white lights no longer seemed like a pipe dream, but an imminent reality! Since my "Christmas" juices have been flowing since after Thanksgiving anyway, I just couldn't wait; yesterday I pulled out all the lights and got to work!

However, if I've learned anything over the last two days, it's that wanting to decorate your house and actually decorating your house are two different things. For one thing, your house looks a whole lot bigger when you're actually un-stringing lights and contemplating how to stretch them across lots and lots of awning/overhang/what have you. For another, now that we have a two-story house, it has gotten a lot more complicated to fully "maintain" its exterior; in other words, we don't have a ladder high enough to reach the second story!

Still, I thought it would be good to at least try to hang a few lights. Luckily my parents were well-prepared; they sent along tons of hooks along with the light strings, so we could hook them to the house more easily. The awning over our front door also has a wood trim, which made it a simple matter to hammer in a few nails and attach some hooks.

A trickier proposition was stringing lights over our garage, since there was no wood trim there. I managed to force a few nails into the stucco (is someone going to chime in now, saying, "That's a terrible idea!!"?), but it was not much fun. I hammered my fingers a number of times, and bent up several nails trying to force them into a substance they probably had no business being in. I ended up throwing away several hopelessly bent nails in disgust. However, I managed to stick a few far enough in that they are holding firm, even with the weight of the lights. Here's hoping they stay put through the holidays!

And now, in the "tempering my expectations" department: some of the light strings are probably a few years old, and not working as well as they used to. One of the strings is about 2/3 dead, while another has about 4 or 5 icicles that just wouldn't light up (I tried to change the fuses and wiggle with some of the dead lights, but my patience gave out. I'm not much of an electrician). I set the first light string aside, and will probably give it up for dead. The second string, however, I ran above the garage. Luckily, the dead section was on an end of the string, so I was able to tuck it up into a corner with duct tape, (presumably) out of sight in the evening.

Well, Aurora seems to like them!

So, with one and a half strings out of commission, I realized I didn't have enough lights to do the upper section of the house this year (I don't have a proper extension cord yet, either). Hopefully this won't make the house look too strange, but I am confident that white icicle lights are pretty enough by themselves to forgive a few mistakes! Besides, there's still the matter of not having a ladder big enough to reach the top of the house. Some friends of ours do have a tall enough ladder, and I might consider borrowing it sometime soon to hammer in some nails along the top roof, even if I won't be needing them this year. Hey, I've got to do this while the manic mood is still upon me!

Ooh...pretty!! It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, isn't it? I'm sure I heard a song about that somewhere...