Lights Up

For the first time ever, I took off two days from work last year:

1. One to put up the Christmas lights
2. One to go shopping

Indeed as most of the stress associated with this festive season is generated by doing things at the last moment, I rightly thought I’d spare myself the agony and get everything over and done with before the “other trolls” got their act together.

So, act #1 was the lights.

The Star of Bethlehem we had purchased at the local Christmas market, last year, had pretty soon thereafter decided to improvise and turn off the bulbs at the end of it’s tail. Funky, but not very appropriate.

So my first step was to go off and purchase a replacement 5 meters of those bendable light tubes. Took me a while to remove the old bit of tubing but, after having hung up the contraption to the side of the house (with DBW’s help, this year: didn’t want the thing to fall off the wall and bust those bulbs…again), the result was stunning.

And once dusk had fallen, and the 27 timers simultaneously done their thing, I stood at the end of the garden, in utter silence:

Nothing that a replacement 5 meters of those bendable light tubes can’t fix…next year!