Category Archives: Christmas Lights

January 10, 2026 · 22:53

Hesperia Christmas Lights 2025 – First Dark

The first night without the lights up is always a sad one. Something’s missing.

The good news, as always, is that five or six days spent putting lights up only take a day or two to take down. Gravity helps.

There was a moment of awe and joy in the whole painful (literally) process. At one point, up on a ladder in a semi-precarious position, on a cold (high 40’s) and windy (15-20 knots with gusts to 30+) afternoon, I noticed a mass of crows headed overhead. I stuck my head out from under the roof and directly overhead, probably not more than 100 feet or so, were two absolutely gorgeous red-tailed hawks circling and hovering in the winds. The image of the crows scrambling to intercept the hawks immediately got compared in my mind to Battle of Britain images of the Spitfires scrambling to climb up to do battle with the German bombers.

The hawks however had another strategy. They caught a thermal and went into a tight spiral in it, their wings never flapping, just cruising up in the jet like they were in an invisible elevator. In less than five minutes they were mere dots in the sky, hundreds of feet up, where the crows couldn’t climb to get them.

Spectuacular, a great treat! I used to watch red-tailed hawks (and other kinds of hawks) at our Scarborough house. It’s such a relief to see them here as well!

Now if we could just get some juncos migrating through…

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Filed under Birds, Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Video

January 9, 2026 · 23:53

Hesperia Christmas Lights 2025 – Last Light

Normally I might have spent last weekend, i.e., first full weekend of the new year, taking down Christmas lights. But last weekend was pouring rain again, and I’m not THAT stupid. Most of this week has been dry, if cold and windy as hell, so this weekend will probably be dedicated to getting that task taken care of.

So, a little bit windblown, here’s last light. (It’s 23:45, windy, and 33° out there – the things I do for my “art”!)

The multiple lines of lights along the roofline did just fine, even with unbelievable amounts of rain and winds gusting at times to 65+ knots. The stuff up in the maple tree came down (at least partially, like here) almost daily when there was wind. And there’s always wind.

I think the wind took down two of the candy canes next to the driveway, but that’s mainly because I figure if it was Hissy, ALL of the candy canes would have been pulled loose or snapped. At least we didn’t have any rabbits chewing on the wiring this year! (See 2024, 2023, 2022…)

In this corner by the garage the wind swirls and spins, so next year I’ll have to remember and find a better way to keep these lights up in the trees and not on the ground.

Already planning and looking forward to next year!

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Photography

December 28, 2025 · 23:29

Which House Is Ours?

As mentioned a couple of times, our street, as lovely as it is (and is really *IS*), is one street of seven in our subdivision, with none of the other streets ever being developed, leaving nothing but empty, graded, ready for construction lots for the last couple of decades. Weird, but it is what it is.

As I mentioned earlier this weekend, because of that, there’s nothing but dirt and weeds on the other side of our back wall, so I started hanging extra Christmas lights on the other side of the back wall. Theoretically I guess that would be in someone else’s yard if they ever built a house on that lot, but they haven’t, so I put lights up that can be seen when you come off of the main street into the back way into the subdivision.

Tonight I walked the two blocks down to the corner where the back entrance is and looked back toward the line of back yard walls on our street. Guess which house is ours!

I think it looks great. As I’ve said, next year I want to extend it out about twenty feet to both sides along the brick wall, and add a couple more loops below these. It will be amazing!

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Photography

December 27, 2025 · 23:00

Quarter Moon O’er The Pergola Lights

Cleaning up some of the (minor) wind damage from this latest storm, had the quarter moon almost straight overhead. From the pergola…

My other discovery about the “new” Forever Home (which I should have discovered five months ago if it weren’t for the fact that I’m an idiot) is that when:

  • I’m in my office and
  • the only other person in the house is The Long-Suffering Wife and
  • she’s a couple of rooms away and
  • we’re in a larger-sized house in a subdivision where all of the houses are on reasonably big lots and thus set away from each other and
  • a song that I really, REALLY like comes on the Sirius Channel 33 (“1st Wave”) Saturday Night Safety Dance

it’s okay for me to turn it up REALLY FUCKING LOUD!!!

That whole flooding thing on Wednesday sorta sucked, but being able to do that makes up for it!

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Music

December 26, 2025 · 23:39

Hesperia Christmas Lights 2025 – Day Five

The back yard – a new frontier!

I’ve always put 99% of the lights up in the front yard where they could be seen by the neighbors and passers by. Yes, I want to show them off! That last 1% went round the sides of the roofline to give a bit of a 3-D sense and something to look at while you’re coming at the house from the side. To give the whole light display some depth.

And so it’s been this year, although with the huge driveway on one side and the garage doors on the side, it’s more like 75% in front and 25% on the one side. No worries, it looks good.

But the Forever Home doesn’t have anything in back of it, no neighbors, no houses, just several vacant, graded pads where houses have never been built. You can sort of see it from the intersection with the main road a block away, and you can see it clearly as you turn off of the main road and come toward our street. The pergola with all of the bird feeders sticks up above the cinder block wall.

And that’s a canvas that I had to start putting lights on this year.

As seen from the house, there are a couple of strings of lights hanging down from the support posts of the pergola. EASY to put up and support, no hooks or hangars or anything else needed. And with the low-power LED lights, you can have thousands of lights in a single string going back and forth.

What you can’t see from this view are the first (top) string running right along the top beam of the pergola and facing outward, and the fourth and fifth arcs of lights, which hang down on the outside of the wall so that they’re visible only from the outside.

(I am SOOOOOOO glad that I didn’t drop my phone over the wall taking this picture, leaning way out.)

I now have the rest of the lights that can fit onto this one string and next year I want to add another loop or two hanging below these two, then I want to extend the loops out from the top of the cinder block wall on either side of the pergola. I think it will look amazing and bright and colorful for anyone coming into the subdivision off of the back entrance from the main road.

As always…

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Memes, Photography

December 25, 2025 · 23:10

Christmas 2025

For those of you who celebrate, I hope this was a peaceful and pleasant holiday. For those who do not celebrate, I hope you had a quiet Thursday without too many inconveniences caused by everything being closed due to everyone else taking the day off.

We had two of the three kids (plus the one son-in-law) here, and we had a Zoom with the out-of-town daughter. The Long-Suffering Wife made our traditional Christmas feast featuring Joe’s BBQ from Kansas City, and there were a gazillion calories to be consumed. It was wonderful.

It was cool (mid 40’s) and windy as Hell, with the next band of rain (not as bad as yesterday) hitting after midnight tonight. Because everything’s already saturated with areas of flooding (nothing too bad near us) we’re back on a Flash Flood Watch. It will be be fine. At least our yard, interior courtyard, and garage no longer have any standing water. Let the healing (i.e., the drying out) begin!

This whole weekend storm has taught us that the City of Hesperia and the County of San Bernardino are aggressive and efficient about communicating about potential hazards. I didn’t necessarily expect that, but I most certainly appreciate it.

Technically tomorrow’s a day off at work, but I’ll likely spend most of the day trying to get caught up on paperwork and data entry. That’s going to be my Christmas gift to myself, spending that time to buy myself a little peace of mind and freedom from some of the usual time pressure. Put on some music or a football game or five, get some snacks, check a dozen or so things off the to-do list from Hell… Golden!

Adulting…

It sucks, but it’s probably better than most of the options.

(Oh, Khan’s gone from the wreath on the front door. Someone twenty miles downwind is going to find that picture in their front yard and I can only imagine what they’ll think about it. KHAAAAAAAANNN!!!!!)

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Photography, Weather

December 24, 2025 · 23:44

The Great Christmas Eve Flash Flood Of 2025

Standing in six inches of freezing cold water in a downpour with a bucket, desperately shoveling water into a large, rolling trash container so that it didn’t flood into the shiny, new, amazing Forever Home was NOT how I expected to spend Christmas Eve. But here we were!

They said we were going to just get a bit of this storm, nowhere near the worst of it. Either they lied, got it badly wrong, or Jeez Louise it must have been really, REALLY bad down by the coast.

It was a long, long night between the winds and the rain. Hey, did anyone else know that the cover on the flue to the fireplace in the master bedroom sounds just like a snare drum in a Neil Peart solo in a deluge?

(Image: Weather Underground app)

The yellow spots weren’t so bad after some of the orange and red blobs. And the City of Hesperia and County of San Bernardino do an extremely thorough and efficient job of notifying us of flash flood warnings, flash flood watches, tornado warnings, and tropical storm warnings by text, voice mail, email, and phone calls. Even in the middle of the night…

The problem in the back yard was annoying, but not much of a threat. It was when we noticed the rising water levels in the interior courtyard that things got exciting. There’s a drain, but it was apparently blocked by leaves. There are doors on all four sides, three of which lead into the house, particularly into my office, the hallway by the dining room, and the living room. Fortunately (by accident or otherwise), the fourth door is the lowest by about two inches and it leads into the garage where there was minimal damage to be suffered. Not a crisis, just a mess.

So out I go into the deluge and the ankle deep, ice cold water, to clear the leaves, set up a sump pump, and grab a bucket to help get the water level down faster than it was going up with all of the runoff from the gutters.

The joys of home ownership! Althought, to be honest, even if we were renting, I still would have been stuck doing this.

After about four hours we finally got the upper hand and the flow into the garage stopped. When the rain finally slacked off to just a Level 8 instead of an 11, I was able to get some warm and dry clothes again.

Being Christmas Eve, while I was bailing and pumping, The Long-Suffering Wife was cooking our first holiday dinner of the weekend. It was wonderful.

A quick check of the Christmas lights shows a couple of strands down on the ground due to the winds, but they all seem to still be on. No short circuits, no water damage. I love it when a plan works!

And we all lived happily ever after. Except, of course, for the mess that I still have to dry out and clean up in the garage. But given the fact that there’s rain expected every day for the next week, maybe we’ll just hold off on that.

 

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Weather

December 23, 2025 · 23:41

The Atmospheric River Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Okay, so it’s more “roaring” than “slouching,” with another HUGE rain event expected (along with the accompanying flooding and mudslides below last summer’s burn areas) and extremely high winds.

No snow for us – snow levels are only supposed to be down around 7,000 feet, and we’re at about 3,950. We should miss the worst of the rain as well – that will be down in the mountains rimming the LA Basin where some places will get nearly a foot of rain in the next four or five days combined. We should get 2-3 inches, which is wet and windy, but hardly a disaster.

It does give the lights a nice, dramatic look!

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Photography, Weather

December 22, 2025 · 23:22

The New Tree – Layer Two

New, bigger, better house – new, bigger, better Christmas tree. An array of options for the built in lighting, we chose to go with twinkling white lights.

Next, it’s time to two full strings of colored lights, plus two full strings of bubble lights.

I do love me some of those bubble lights. A fond memory from my childhood, even if they were the very old-fashioned kind that were both highly flammable and poisonous. (Or should that be venomous?)

The modern lights are safer. But they will still break if banged around, and today the algorithm brought me a string of videos of large dogs, particularly great danes, obliterating Christmas trees, and The Long-Suffering Wife dearly wants a great dane, so… Let’s hope this isn’t a foreshadowing comment.

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Dogs, Photography, Ronnie

December 21, 2025 · 23:04

Winter Solstice 2025

As the light dies at the end of the shortest day of the year, we try to supplement the remaining light in the beautiful sunset with those of our own celebrations.

You can think and believe what you want about the Bible and the story of Jesus’ birth, but I’ll guarantee you that he wasn’t born in late December or the middle of winter. Too many things point to a spring birth. But the reason the early Christians celebrated around the winter solstice was so that they would blend in, not stand out, and not be targets for persecution.

The winter solstice was known and celebrated a thousand year or more before the Roman Empire. Pre-historic peoples needed to know the seasons in order to know when to plant crops, when to hunt, how to survive. The days gettting shorter and colder had to be terrifying with no knowledge of what was causing it (Earth’s axial tilt) and whether or not longer, warmer days would return. So when the solstice came and the days started to lengthen again, it was a cause for celebration, often with symbols of light being prominent.

Millenia later, I put up a gazillion Christmas lights. Slightly different reasoning and knowledge bases perhaps, same celebration.

Welcome back to the light!

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Filed under Astronomy, Christmas Lights, Photography, Sunsets