Sunday, December 7, 2008

I'M MARRIED TO CLARK GRISWOLD

My husband LOVES Christmas-especially the part that involves decorating the house with Christmas Lights. Over the years we have collected all kinds of Christmas paraphernalia; we have a HUGE plastic Santa that sits on the top of our roof every year, Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus sit on our lawn, we have had large plastic Christmas candles that lined the walk up to our house, a Santa on a stick by the front door, a HUGE "Welcome" mat, and lots of poinsettias. But the icing on the cake is the lighting. Jade takes great pride in making sure ALL the lights are in working order, that they all face the SAME direction. He gets up early, puts on his work clothes, pops "Carpenter Christmas" in the CD player, drags out his ladders and extension cords and gets to work. He never complains. It's kinda like a crusade for him. He has extension cords running in and out of windows, across eves, through the plants, across the roof and down the side of the house. He is very artistic and so we have lights around each window, around the posts on the front porch, lining the garage door, the front door, on ALL the eves of the top and bottom story, the chimney and just for good measure we have LIGHT NETS for the plants in the yard. (Who knew?) He likes to put them all on timers so that they come on early and go off late. We want to share our Christmas Joy with EVERYONE. His FAVORITE lights are the "old school" large ceramic bulbs that each run on about 5 watts a piece. Guess what our electricity bill runs during the month of December? I have tried to encourage him to cut back the time the lights are on. I say, "Honey, this year, instead of running the lights for 7 hours a night, lets share the power with the ENTIRE neighborhood and only run them 5 hours." This year I FINALLY succeeded in trying a little experiment. With the economy in the state that it is in I said to my dear husband, "Honey, why don't we go green with our Christmas lighting this year?" Oops-I forgot, Jade has a VERY strong dislike for "Inconvenient Truths". So I quickly rephrased my question, "Honey, why don't we save $100 this month and use LED Christmas lighting?" I was surprised that he agreed. So I ran to Costco and purchased the colored LED strands of 100 lights before he had time to reconsider. The entire strand uses 8 watts! After he hung them I could tell he was VERY sad and disappointed. Gone were his beloved 5 watt old-school lights and instead were these miserable, wimpy, feeble energy saving lights. So I dedicate this blog post to my dear, sweet hubby who I lovingly have nicknamed,

"Clark Griswold".
(click on link "clark griswold" above)
These LED lights are so weak that they don't even show up in the photo!
Not only that, but they look BLUE!






3 comments:

Meg said...

Poor Jade! At least you didn't go LED on the Manger. Our lights are up but only because we've become the sort of people who didn't take them down last year.
Love,
Meg

Brittanie said...

aw, sad. I was so looking forward to all the lights that dad puts up every year. But, I guess you have to save energy somewhere. :(

Debi Lassen said...

Guess what? We did the same thing! We needed to replace our simple little string of icycle lights along the eves of our house...John went out and bought new ones and thought he'd try the LED to save money, too! Yep...they are light blue, not white. Else came in the house the first night they were on and said, "happy hannakah". Oh well! New trend, I guess.(I like the bright lights better myself, but there's no way we are changing them THIS year!)