Sunday, December 07, 2014

Decorating for the Holidays!

Christmas Tree Lighting
The outside x-mas tree is all lit up!

This is our first Christmas at the new house! We've never really decorated much at the places that we rented, but I really wanted to do something cool. The first thing I did over this weekend was put up the multicolored icicle lights along the roof eaves. When we bought the house, there were a bunch of small hooks on the underside of where the roof hangs over. I didn't really know what they were for, but Shelby told me that they were for Christmas lighting. Over the summer, I was using them to hang bird feeders, but now I used them to string the icicle lights up. However, the hooks didn't go all the way around the house, so I went to Home Depot and bought a big pack of the little screw in hooks and finished off the rest of the house.
Once all the icicle lights were done, I had a bunch of left over lights. I got the idea that we should decorate the big pine tree in front of our house instead of having an indoor xmas tree. Plus you can see that tree from all around, so other people will see it all decorated too. When I told Romy my idea, he said I was crazy and that it would not be possible to get up the tree and that it would be a waste of time. But I was super determined!

Christmas Tree Lighting
Can you see me up there?!I'm about 3/4 of the way up.

Not even Romy could discourage me from decorating the tree. I dragged him to the store where I bought a lighted star for the top of the tree. Then I went upstairs to where our rock climbing stuff is in the closet, and pulled out my climbing harness, carabiners, and a bunch of webbing. We put the ladder up the the tree trunk and conveniently, it was high enough (13 feet) to reach the bottom branches. I started climbing, and as I went, I moved the webbing up the truck. There were a lot of strong branches, so I really didn't need the webbing, but it was really nice to have it at the top where I rested and hung off it while I positioned the star at the top.

Christmas Tree Lighting
On my way down.

Once the star was on the top, I connected it to the string of LED lights and threw them down to Romy, who was on the ground ready to start whipping the lights around the tree. It was a lot harder than I thought initially to get the lights to wrap around the tree, but we did the best we could given the branch pattern of the tree. I like how it turned out!