Category Archives: Christmas Lights

November 29, 2013 · 17:43

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:

photo 1

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:

photo 2There 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!!

 

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Filed under Castle Willett, Christmas Lights, Photography

November 14, 2013 · 20:37

Flash Fiction Challenge (Micro-Sized This Week)

It’s Thursday, which traditionally demands the publishing of whatever I’ve written for Chuck Wendig’s weekly Flash Fiction Challenge. Once again, possibly because of many of Chuck’s Legion of Disciples ™ are sweating through a NaNoWriMo novel this month, this week’s Challenge is short and simple. Write a story’s first line, no more than fifteen words. Next week we’ll all use someone else’s first line to write our weekly stories, and there’s a prize (Chuck’s new book) for the author of the first line that gets used by the most other people. My submitted first line is:

Marley was not dead no matter what Scrooge said, and I doubted he would be.

When it doubt, study how the masters do it — then borrow, imitate, and twist it around a bit.

In other  major news of the season, I saw my first Christmas lights of the season tonight! Someone about four blocks from home has a few strands of those pale, pastel LED lights up along with a huge star over the garage. My cells all long to join in the festivities and start stringing up our multiple megawatts of magnificence — but the NaNoWriMo project calls, and we probably still have that Mrs. Kravitz wannabe in the neighborhood who anonymously gets their nose out of whack if the lights go up before Thanksgiving or aren’t taken down by mid-January. So for now, the lights lurk in the garage, waiting, lusting, hungering for the night, striving to call 737’s down from the sky…

Two more weeks.

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Science Fiction, Writing

April 30, 2013 · 15:32

A Change In The Seasons

With May almost here I decided to finally take down the last of the Christmas lights today.

I know what you’re thinking. “Oh…he’s one of THOSE people!” Well, not to worry. I’m not. At least, I don’t think I am. I guess I might be, but I’m probably not.

First, if you think “those” people are the ones who call them “Christmas lights” when they’re really “holiday lights”, then you should be aware that I’m a strong opponent of what Philip K. Howard referred to as “The Death Of Common Sense”. C’mon, y’all! Can’t we find more important things to bicker about?

If you think “those” people are the ones who put up  a couple of gigawatts of Christmas lights each year and have crowds clogging the streets for blocks around to see it between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, then, no, I’m not one of those people. My long-suffering wife might have a different opinion of that since we do have a LOT more lights than the average for the neighborhood and she probably would have liked to know a bit more about the whole “Christmas light thing” before we got married, but I’m still not one of “those” people. Maybe just kind of a “those” people apprentice.

If you think “those” people are the ones who leave their Christmas lights up all year round, I’m not really one of those either. There was the one year early on after we had moved in here when the lights didn’t come down until late January (something was going on at work, I’m sure, I don’t remember what) and we got a semi-rude, anonymous, handwritten note from a local “Mrs. Kravitz” about “neighborhood property values” (more on that sort of thing some time later, I’m sure), but our lights are always down the first or second week of January.

Except this year, when 99% of them came down in mid-January and then I ran out of steam and daylight on that fateful day and left a couple of strings of white stars up in the dying white birch tree and one particularly difficult to reach string around the bedroom windows. No one’s said anything, no one’s complained, not even “Mrs. Kravitz”, but the lights’ presence has been a reminder every time I go outside that there’s a little chore still hanging fire. But it wasn’t a particularly high priority chore and this has been “A Time Of Changes”,  so somehow the last 1% of the lights stayed up.

Until today. There were other chores to be taken care of out in front and I had the ladder out to begin with and that annoying little Catholic altar boy conscience voice was whining about how “it’s almost Maaaaaaay”, so down came the last of the lights.

Will that annoying little Catholic altar boy conscience voice leave me alone now? Yeah, right – you two haven’t met yet, have you? It’s already bugging me about how my daughter’s car still has a dead battery from that whole Coalinga breakdown adventure thing, and I need to trim the bushes around the gas meter, and the Jacuzzi still needs to be cleaned and fixed, and… Annoying little Catholic altar boy conscience voice has a “Honey Do” list that would be the pride of any sitcom-starring, nagging wife.

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