Putting up Christmas Lights on the Flowers' house

While Theresa's domain is decorating our Christmas tree inside the house, my job is decorating the outside of the house. I've always wanted a house that I can go nuts with, and every year I add even more lights.

Decorating is done over the course of a few days. I've found that storing the lights individually in gallon ziplock bags and in a large hardshell container helps keep the tangles to a minimum with fewer damaged bulbs.

Decorating the house is fairly easy. Decorating the palm trees is hard. They're getting taller and taller and my ladder is the same height. Richard helped me out with stringing all the really tall palm fronds.

Ian was inspecting my work from the doorway.

And helped me lay out the lines across the yard.

As I was putting a few new lights on the fence, I looked down and see my little helper making his way up to me.

Theresa was there just in case of any slips, but he made his way up the first three rungs without any help at all. This boy is sure to get into everything as he gets bigger.

Happy to have made it to the top.

Sometimes we have the most beautiful pink and purple sunsets.

When it's dark though, the yard really shines.

The lights are on a timer of course, but I can control them with my phone too. One of Ian's favorite things to do when I get home from work is to go outside with me and turn the lights on and off.

New this year are the lights on the right fence here, plus the lights decorating the giant tree in the backyard. I had been wondering how to decorate that giant tree for some time now. Before it just looked like a giant black splotch on the sky. Now it's much more festive. How did I do it? Lasers!

All that hard work on the palm trees really paid off.

You can definitely see my house from a ways down the street.

Our front door.

With the classic Mickey wreath made of bells.

Next year I'll have to get a final count on the number of lights. What I do know is that since they're all LED, they only draw 288 Watts. That's less than three 100 Watt lightbulbs and based on how much I pay for electricity, costs about 10 cents per hour.

Merry Christmas from the Flowers!