(I must pause and say that Mr. Crackers really took one for the team on this one. The lights were hung right under our 2nd story eaves, which required him to use our extension ladder. I should mention that he really, really does not like heights - nope, not at all. Thank you, thank you, thank you Mr. Crackers!).
Now that it's all done, I have to say the house looks really good:
OK, that's not really our house. This is:
Doesn't it look great? Just the right amount of lights (for me anyway).
Ever since we made our move into our first suburban home, Mr. Crackers has taken over responsibility for decorating the outside of our house. He's really done a great job of it in recent years but, and I think he would agree with me here, some of his past efforts have had mixed results.
Probably the biggest decorating "challenge" he had came back when we first were living in the suburbs of Atlanta. Our home had no bushes or trees that could be decorated in the front yard. We had some tall pines, but no one was climbing 30 feet in the air to hang some Christmas lights on those suckers. For some reason (I'm not sure why, although I am sure there was some thought behind it) we decided that we needed some kind of outdoor Christmas tree display.
When we talked about the idea,I had a picture in my head of what we would be getting and it looked like this.
Most of you are now thinking that we headed over to our local Target store and picked up a few of these babies (I will admit here, that was my plan).
But, honestly that would be too easy, where would the fun be in that? And, let's not forget that Mr. Crackers likes a good project. So, he decided that he would make us some Christmas trees himself using chicken wire.
Yes, that's right, I said chicken wire.
He decided that he would use the posts from his old boy scout tent & fashion a chicken wire cone around each pole. He would then string multi-colored lights through the chicken wire in an attempt to make it look more like a Christmas tree. I think the vision in his head looked like this:
But, sadly, this is not what our trees looked like. It turns out that chicken wire is really difficult to work with, especially if you don't have the right tools. So, instead of cones that kind of looked like Christmas trees made out of chicken wire like this,
we had something that was (if you used your imagination) kind of conical in shape, but only if you squinted and viewed them from a distance (maybe from about 60 feet away or so? Really, just kidding Mr. Crackers!). Seriously, they looked like very short, very squat tee-pees complete with the large opening in the back.
Anyway, he finished them up & hung some multi-colored lights on them & we used them for a couple of years. I have no photographs of the trees to share with you because, er well, they weren't really all that pretty to look at. But, all of the extra lights on them did make our house appear more festive for the holidays.
Sadly, the trees did not survive our move to Ohio from Atlanta (I am not saying I intentionally
Putting all that aside, I have to say that these days Mr. Crackers has really hit his stride. He has a holiday vision that (without the aid of chicken wire) really puts a magical spin on Christmas for the whole family.
Thanks again Babe! The lights look great.
If you would like to make your own chicken wire Christmas trees, here's the link I found. Good luck to you my friend! May the force be with you.
1 comment:
Which makes our Christmas decorations look even more pathetic than usual! Mark did lights one time. Actually twice since he had to re-do them because the plugs were all in the wrong places once he got them hung! For some reason, he's never done them since!
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