As mentioned in my previous post, we have already come across some decorating obstacles this year and we haven't even gotten through half! There's always a thing in decorating every year that causes me an exorbitant amount of frustration during the decorating process. The thing that follows me around in every project, even when I get to something easy that I have done many time with no problems, there the thing is, looming over the entire project, a menace to my Christmas spirit. This year that thing, that menace, is the lighting!
Last year we made two major Christmas decoration purchases: My big, beautiful, 9 foot, pre-lit, fake-but-doesn't-look-fake Christmas tree for the living room and we made the switch from some hand-me-down icicle lights to the C9 LED lights. We made these investments thinking that they would look good, but also make our lives easier. The LED lights are supposed to allow you to plug in a million strands to one outlet without shorting anything out and the pre-lit tree is only three pieces instead of 72 and is PRE-LIT!
Tony attempted to put up our Christmas lights outside the day after Thanksgiving. He plugged in each strand in the house to test it before putting them on the roof and all worked well at first. Then he gets to the last 3 strands that wimped out on us last year halfway through the Christmas season, and of course only half of them work. So we took an hour and a half to part out the last three strands and make one Franken-strand. Once that is up, we had two additional strands that we bought this year so that we could do some additional areas that we had not done previously. Apparently this years warm-white of the same brand, is not the same as last year's warm white...BAAAAH!!! On top of that, once the lights that made it onto the house were plugged in, there were huge spans that didn't light up, so frustrating!
