It's beginning to look a lot like . . . massive electricity bills

Christmas 2009 - One of the reasons I loved our house was that I knew it would look great at Christmas.  According to my dear wife, I have a "problem," that is, I tend to go a little nutty with Christmas decorations.  Think Clarke Griswold with OCD.  So of course, before we even bought the house I had a plan for how I wanted to do Christmas lights, both inside and out.  I even had the electricians add strategically placed outlets for Christmas lights, including one outside and one on top of the mantel.

My initial plan was to use LED bulbs to line the front roof line of the house.  After shopping for them for months online (and seeing how expensive they were), I found that Walmart carried them.  So I bought several hundred feet of lights and over a thousand plastic clips to attach them to the roof.  Due to Monica's ban on early Christmas lights, I wasn't allowed to start putting them up until the weekend after Thanksgiving.  Thankfully, my brother was staying with us that weekend, so I recruited him to help me test the new light strings and pre-mount them on the clips.  That took several hours.  

The failed LED lights

When the lights were finally tested and strung, Randal helped me put them up (in 35 degree weather), including steadying the ladder on top of the porch roof so I could reach the peak of the front gable.  That evening, when it came time for the grand illumination of the roof lights, I was sorely disappointed.  Unfortunately, you get what you pay for and it turned out that the Wally World light strings were all significantly different colors.  I immediately went back up on the roof myself in the dark and took down the offending dimmer strings.  

The next day I went to Walmart and went through over 50 boxes of LED lights, taking each over to an outlet in the corner of the decorations area to test it's color.  When I found enough that I thought I was satisfied with, I took them home and installed them that night on the roof.  This time I had Monica's begrudging help because it was windy and in the high 20's.  I then came off the roof and put up all of the incandescent lights on the porch and along the first story.  

Times Square, Pennsauken, NJ

When I stepped back to take it all in, I again was disappointed.  The allegedly "warm white" LED's were a totally different color than the incandescent strings and my OCD kicked into high gear again.  So I went back up on the roof and tore down all of the LED lights.  I decided that the mix of LEDs and incandescents would never work, so I was back at Walmart the next day, stocking up on thousands of icicle lights.  That night, with temperatures hovering around 20 with 15-10 mph winds, I installed the icicle lights.  I was thoroughly frozen, but happy with the outside.  

The living room decorations

Then I turned to the inside, putting up the tree, hand lighting the new wreath above the mantel and basically putting lights everywhere Monica would tolerate.  When I was finished (although not completely satisfied because I was not allowed to light every room in the house), my Christmas-light-o-tacular vision was pretty close to being realized.  Our house just looks naturally great at Christmas.  Then we were buried by a huge blizzard the week before Christmas, which dumped over 24 inches of snow on us.  That was a wonderful little touch by Mother Nature to make my decorations complete.  All the while I was out shoveling, Monica had old fashioned Christmas music playing through the porch speakers to give our whole neighborhood some cheer (see the video below).  

However, due to that snowfall, the very low temperatures, and even more snow and ice afterwards, I wasn't actually able to get up on the roof to remove the lights until the end of January.  We went from Christmas classic to hot-mess rednecks in a few short week.  That and we got our electric bill which went up over $200 for the time when the lights were up (I still insist the meter was read wrong).  Oh well.  At least I got to stock up on after Christmas clearance lights (several more thousand) to work up my planned Christmas 2010 spectacular!