Last Light & First Light

With Thanksgiving in our rear-view mirror, the primary occupation for the Friday after Thanksgiving in our household for the past thirty years or so has been putting up Christmas lights. The Los Angeles weather actually interfered with that a bit today, with more light rain (insert “STORM WATCH 2013” joke here) overnight and this morning. It may be a family tradition, but I’m not stupid enough to go out and play with electricity while standing on a metal ladder in the rain. Bad juju with that plan.

By mid-afternoon it had cleared and dried enough to get a start. We got four of our six power (extension cord) lines strung, and the two remaining are the easy ones to get finished tomorrow. Then I got the first two sets of big lights up along the gutters.

We’re not one of THOSE families when it comes to Christmas lights (you won’t find us featured on any Discovery Channel specials and the police don’t have to set up traffic control on our block to handle the sightseers), but we are probably one of those families. We definitely have the most lights of any house in the neighborhood, and we might have more than the second and third place houses combined. Maybe. We’re the ones who skew the curve for everyone else, but we get a lot of nice comments from the neighbors and folks walking their dogs, so I don’t think it’s a problem. At least, it’s not a problem as long as we take them down by mid-January. (Another story for another day.)

With the clouds leaving the area at sunset, the day’s last light was very pretty:

In the lower left of the picture above, and even more so in the picture below, you can also see the first light from this year’s Christmas display:

There will be many, many more lights in the days to come. Trust me.

We’re going to have to make a few adjustments this year. The tree that was on the west side of the driveway is gone, so the lights that normally went there will have to find a new home. The huge palm tree you see here used to be much bushier, thicker, and overgrown. We would put twin spirals of red and white lights around it to make it look like a candy cane. (Sorta.) Now that it’s been trimmed and severely cleaned up, that may or may not work. No worries, we’ll figure out something.

It’s Christmas light time!!