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Tuesday, December 22, 2015

2015 Flowers Family Christmas Lights

One of my favorite parts of the holidays is going overboard on Christmas lights. I see the Griswold house in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and consider it to be a challenge.

For comparison. 

This year I had a great little helper. After I got everything out of the attic, he helped me bring it out to the driveway.

He asked me for "more Christmas lights". Hmm, we'll have to ask Mommy, but she'll probably say I have enough. 

Unboxing all the lights.

I find it helps to lay them out in the sun before stringing them up. It warms the plastic and makes them a little easier to stretch. 

This year, I could focus on putting lights on the fences and Ian would keep bringing me new strings.


Ian, where does the next set of lights go? "Right dere."

At the end of last year I was able to get a deal on a bunch of different lights. But what to do with them? I always thought the yard could use a bit more decoration, so how about a Mega-Tree! First we need to construct the base.  

Ian liked helping out by bringing me hooks and telling me where they go. 

Then Ian brought me big rolls of lights. Compared to how big he is, it's huge!

Because of the drought, I haven't been watering my lawn very frequently. Everyone is being asked to "Go For The Gold" with our lawns. Because of my lawn lights, I won't be watering for the next 6 weeks, so it's going to be a little more "gold" than I'd like. Hmm, how can I fix that?

How about painting the grass?!? I'd read about others doing it and was curious to give it a go. Here's the yard in progress. You can see I've finished the back corner and have started to go around the edges. 

All finished! Look at that healthy green lawn. 

After moving the Mega-Tree into the yard, Ian was eye-balling it pretty good. 

Looks like a new toy for Ian. 



This one needs adjusting. 

Ian, I need an extension cord. 

This one? 

Every night when I got home from work, it'd be right about time to turn on the Christmas lights. Ian would come running when I opened the door and I'd ask him what time it was. He'd tell me "Christmas Lights" then we'd head out to the driveway.
I'd pull up the app on my phone, Ian would press the green button, and all the lights would come on around us!

Turn on the lights!


New this year are the Mega-Tree, three smaller trees in the yard, the green in the palm trees (last year they were white, good suggestion to change them Theresa), and I was able to complete the lights on the right fence. 

It definitely lights up the neighborhood. 


The laser lights in the tree look great this year and I had a couple people wondering how I got all those lights up in the tree. 

Our front porch. 

And there's the Mega-Tree. It's a little over 11' tall and has nearly 1000 lights making up the bottom, plus I used another 500 lights to make up the star. 

We don't have many trees in the yard, so Theresa thought we could use a few more.

Even the little tree by the street got into the act this year, with a few sets of LED lights that run on batteries.

I'm always curious how many lights I've got up, but it's so hard to count. I can tell you though that they're all LED and in total, they draw 403 Watts and it costs about 12 cents an hour to run.

Compare that to my non-LED Christmas tree, which has a lot less lights, but still draws 360 Watts.


The only hard part now, it figuring out how to go bigger and better next year!

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