Christmas lights ’04 blog.

Cold and windy today, a bad combination. It didn’t keep us indoors, but that wouldn’t have been a bad idea.

The Christmas tree is up. We fetched it from a lot on Saturday afternoon, conveyed it home in the back of the minivan, and decorated it in short order. For more on my way of decorating a Christmas tree, see the December 11, 2003 entry, because it was the same this year. Whatever your Christmas customs, that’s the important thing.

There were some small changes. We added a string of tiny lights, making three strings total, since we thought last year’s tree was a little underlit. Lilly was more adept at ornamentation skills this year than last, especially at the concept of spacing the baubles. In fact, she did most of the middle branches, while I did the higher ones. The lower branches weren’t completely naked, but there’s no glass down in those precincts. Lilly did hang a full rank of plastic bells down that way, however, maybe with the intention of drawing Ann’s attention. It works, too, more or less.

Our outdoor lights have been up for a week. I took advantage of last weekend’s relative warmth for the job, and it looked like a lot of other people did too. That weekend, lights were strung, electric statues posted, and inflatables inflated all around the suburbs that I could see. There’s a mocking essay somewhere in the subject of lawn inflatables, as the early 21st-century equivalent of pink flamingos, but I don’t quite have it in me.