It’s officially December, which means I have permission to go nuts on Christmas stuff. The outside of the house is already decorated – Denis and I spent most of Thanksgiving weekend putting everything up, including some new things that I made this year. We had a lot of issues of things being broken when we brought it out of storage. Most of our net lights were broken, one of my metal trees wouldn’t turn on, and we had a few strings of lights that were done for. Oh, and for some reason three of our pre-lit wreaths that we put in the windows didn’t light up. Very strange. Unfortunately, we didn’t discover they were not lighting up until AFTER we had installed them on the house – and since they are part of the musical light show, we had to come up with a plan. In the end, I bought some short string lights and Denis climbed back up the ladder and strung the three broken wreaths with new lights.
We managed to get the entire front yard done by the Sunday after Thanksgiving and turned in the musical light show earlier than I originally anticipated. But it was so exhausting getting everything installed, that we’ve already decided to take a break next year and not do a big light show in 2017. We’ll just hang the wreaths in the windows and on the front door and call it done.
This year’s show looks good. Last year I only did 4 songs, but this year I’ve got 13 songs in the queue, running continuously all evening. So far we’ve had no major issues other than a brief rainstorm/tornado warning last night that narrowly missed our area but didn’t hurt the display. But it did touch down about 5-6 miles north of us and caused a lot of damage – trees down, power lines down, patio furniture hurled a block away, etc. But all we got was a major downpour of rain – which was a relief! Nonetheless, I did go out and reinforce all the big pieces with additional stakes to try to prevent them flying away if we get another huge storm like the one that came through last night.
Anyway, we were so tired from decorating the outside over Thanksgiving weekend that it’s already December 1st and we have yet to even BEGIN decorating the inside. We’ll be doing that this weekend, since our annual White Elephant party is coming up on December 10. But I have to say that I’m tired even just THINKING about doing more decorating.
As for the party, we decided not to make cookies this year – instead, we’re opting to make two non-cookie things and we think they’ll be a big hit. And fortunately, they are much easier to make. One item I’ve been making a batch of every night this week until we have enough – it’s dead easy to make and so delicious it’s hard for me not to snack on them when they come out of the oven. The other item we’ll be making either tomorrow night or Saturday after we’re doing decorating the house.
We have a plan for the food – including some new things – and it should be another year of tasty treats. I’m debating doing jello shots again – I saw a picture recently of red and green jello shot cups stacked into a Christmas tree, and of course I loved it and want to do it.
So that’s what is going on as we head into the Christmas season. More in the coming week or so – including a post listing out the food we plan on making for this year’s party. We’re going to have a full house – we’ve already got 35 confirmed to attend, so we’ll be cooking up a storm in a week’s time!
