THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Every neighborhood has one. He’s the guy that puts his Christmas decorations up over the Thanksgiving weekend…and takes all four days to do it. Like he’s got nothing better to do for four days. In 1989 National Lampoon even gave him a name, Clark Griswold. Cars will slow down and watch him work. The men will flash a hearty thumbs up thinking all the while “I’m glad that jerk doesn’t live next door to me.” This is because they know. They know that the minute their wives see this nightmare of a neighbor they will immediately cross their arms over their ample bosoms and give their husband the stink eye. Wives turn the whole thing into a competition, and you have to outdo Clark. All the poor husband wants to do is zone out on the sofa, beer in hand, watching whatever three games the NFL has deemed worthy for the day. It was two games, until the owners realized they could increase their television revenue for the day by 50% if they added a third game. Somewhere around halftime of the second game, on the West Coast, someone will announce that dinner is served. The husband joins the rest of the family; kids and/or grandkids, in laws, brothers, sisters, parents, the single neighbor the wife always invites because he’s all by himself and looks so lonely, pets, and anyone else in the extended family, as they proceed to eat themselves into a tryptophan induced coma. All the while, Clarke Griswold is happily hammering away.

Dusk on Sunday. Everything is neatly in place as Clark throws that switch for the first time. The lights in all the other houses in the neighborhood dim and flicker. The transformers put out an audible hum as the Griswold house sucks up all available power they can muster. The airport starts using his house as a nighttime directional beacon. You swear they can see this thing from the International Space Station. “Roger Houston. We are coming up on North America nightside. And we have a sighting of the Clark Griswold house right on schedule. Looks like he’s added a few extras this year. You have yourselves a happy Thanksgiving.”

Well, I am here to say, I am that guy. I am your worst Thanksgiving nightmare. And I’ll be lighting up your neighborhood all the way through the first week of January. It could be worse, though. I could be the guy that moved into the neighborhood in 2010 and for the first three years didn’t do anything for Christmas. Then, in August of 2014, he nailed a string of lights up around the house, probably to make his wife stop nagging him after she saw the Griswold house. If you want to see his lights look out the window any time of year, they are still there. You may want to check them out in the daytime seeing as only about a third of them still light up. I am not that guy. You’re welcome!

I am here to tell you that after doing this for more than 20 years I have actually developed a system to save set up time. If you want to really annoy your neighbors, get out of honey-dos for the Thanksgiving weekend, just saw Christmas Vacation and thought, “I should do something like that,” or just ever wanted to know how to REALLY do your house for Christmas, then read on. If none of the above, then you can expect a large lump of coal in your Christmas stocking. I have three different outside outlets located around the front of my house that I plug everything into. First, I run a short extension cord, between eight and twelve feet depending on various factors, from each outlet and plug my timer into that. I plug one end of another short, eight-foot extension cord into each timer and plug a five-way outlet into the other end of that. The outlet looks something like a six tentacled octopus. A six-to-pus?

Now I sync up the time on each of the timers and set the lights to come on around 5:00 o’clock in the afternoon. Next, I plug a string of lights into each timer and wait. This setup really doesn’t take all that long, maybe a few hours including time to dig everything out of storage. I usually try to do it the weekend before or one of the three days during the week leading up to Thanksgiving. As soon as one of the three timers clicks on, I run over to the other two timers and turn them on as well. This way all of the lights come on at roughly the same time. Everything is programmed to turn off about midnight. One last thing I also like to do at this time is set up my music box. I have a box that plays various Christmas tunes, and I can plug lights into it to blink on and off in time with the music. I like to set that up and plug it into one of the timers. That is how I let the neighbors know it has begun. It won’t be long now before my front yard explodes in a dazzling display of light and color. This year, when I went to test the music box, it didn’t work. Well, I’ve been using this same box for about six years. It was made in China, which means I probably got five and a half more years of use out of it than I should have. My wife mentioned to a couple of the neighbors that there probably wasn’t going to be music this year. Strangely, they all said that was their favorite part of the display. Hearing that music stream out of our house put everybody in the Christmas spirit. Good luck finding a replacement at any of the stores. Used to be, you could find good Christmas stuff right through Thanksgiving weekend. Nowadays, the stores put out their Christmas stuff in early October and are picked pretty clean the weekend before Thanksgiving. As was the case now. Thank God for Amazon! I found a new music box online, ordered it, and had it delivered just in time for Thanksgiving.

Next is my perimeter lighting. The perimeter of our front yard is roughly 200 feet. there was a time I would string lights around the entire perimeter, staking each individual bulb into the ground. There were several problems with that approach. For starters, this represents about 300 individual light bulbs. I would shove a plastic stake into the ground and then attach a bulb to each stake. Attaching the bulbs to the stakes wasn’t much of a problem but getting the stakes into the ground was an altogether different story. In some places the ground was either too hard or had too many tree roots. The other problem with this approach is it meant spending a lot of time on my knees and hunched over as I worked my way around the perimeter. The older I get, the harder this is on my knees and back. Then, a few years ago, I bought a set of knee pads. The type you might use when working on the floor stretching carpeting. If you are approaching or beyond age 60, I highly recommend buying knee pads. They are a godsend. Not much I can do for my back. Forty years working in a machine shop has pretty much messed it up anyway. I just take frequent breaks to stretch it out. This meant the process to set up my perimeter lights took up the better part of a day. The older I get the longer it takes. This year I tried something new. I purchased 24 lengths of half inch diameter rebar in four-foot lengths. I also bought six 12-foot lengths of ½” PVC. I cut the PVC into three-foot lengths and, with my radial arm saw, cut a one-inch-long vertical slot in the ends. Then I painted them all green.

When it came time to set up, I used a five-pound sledgehammer and drove the rebar into the ground just a tad over one foot deep, leaving about thirty-four inches above ground. I spaced these out at six-foot intervals. Then it was simply a matter of sliding the PVC over each stake. I then strung my C-9 LED Christmas lights from stake-to-stake, with a nice little dip in the line, and worked my way around the sides and front of my yard. It was a little extra work this year, cutting, notching, and painting the PVC. For just the installation, though, instead of most of the day followed by sore knees and a stiff back, it took me two hours. Here’s a helpful tip. Use LED lights for your outdoor (and indoor for that matter) Christmas lights. They’re more expensive but they’re brighter, they last longer, and you can string multiple sets together without fear of throwing breakers or burning out fuses. Read the manufacturer recommendations, but I know from experience, before I switched over to the LED lights if I strung more than three 25 footers together, I would burn out fuses. With the lights I am using now the manufacturer says I can string together up to nine sets. That’s 425 feet. Gives me some great ideas!

The rear section of our front yard abuts up against plants and shrubs, forming a six-to-eight-foot buffer to the house itself. The line here isn’t straight but rather curves irregularly, back and forth. I have these red and white lighted candy canes that stand twenty-seven inches tall. They come in sets of three, but can be strung together, up to thirteen sets on one circuit. Each cane has a plastic stake in the bottom so it can be staked into the ground. Last year, by a stroke of genius (or more likely prompted by my soon-to-be sore back), I decided to save wear and tear and stake these candy canes along the irregular perimeter. Unfortunately, I only had enough candy canes to go about a third of the way. I checked, and by then the stores were pretty well picked over. So, I made a mental note to buy some more for next (this) Christmas. (Note to self. You are 63 years old. Do not make any more mental notes.) Of course, I never bought any more lighted candy canes and by the time I got to this part of the build and checked, the stores were again sold out. I went to what has really become my go to since COVID hit. That being online in general and Amazon in particular. Amazon had them at a cost of almost $30 for a set of three. I calculated I needed eight sets so that’s $240 for lighted candy canes and delivery was about 10 days out. I went onto the manufacturer website, and they had them for about the same price with delivery after Christmas. On a whim, I went onto the Home Depot site. There they had sets of three selling for $9.98 per set with expected delivery in six to nine days. Sold! So those were on order with my music box.

We have a large house on a 1/3-acre lot. If you look at the house from the front, on the right-hand side we have a gate with a driveway leading to RV parking. Then there is the main house left of the RV parking. To the extreme left is an attached garage fronted by a concrete driveway that slopes gently down to street level. Next to the driveway, even more extreme left, is a border about eight feet wide that goes to the property line. Growing in that area are several shrubs and what I believe to be an Elm tree. I cover the shrubs with a mesh type lighting that looks very decorative and string more C-9 lights on the lower branches that I can reach. I have a couple of lighted Christmas wreaths that I hang on the house between a set of three windows. Then I string lights around the outside of the windows. Now the real work begins. I run more C-9 lighting along the pitched roofline on the side of the house, starting at the peak and bringing it down and across the eaves, with the rain gutters, along the front of the house, back up the pitched ‘A’ frame above the garage to that respective peak, then back down and around the eaves on the side of the house. This requires a lot of climbing up and down ladders, a literal pain. One of these years I’m going to get a cloth mannequin, dress it in my clothes, wrap several winds of Christmas lights around it, and hang it off the roof. Wonder if it’ll fool the neighbors? And that pretty much wrapped up day two of my build.

The following day was roof work. Not recommended if you have a fear of heights. A little aside here. When you’re hanging your lights like this, you are getting into areas of your house you don’t normally see and/or notice. In previous years, the one thing that would always catch my attention when I went to hang the lights around my eaves, is I would notice how full the rain gutters were with leaves from our two large overhanging oak trees. I would generally lose an entire day just cleaning out the gutters. Over the years, I actually had developed a very cool and efficient way of doing this. I would get up on a ladder and place my shop vac on the roof, sucking the leaves out of the gutter with the vacuum. The only trouble is, a shop vac is on wheels and tends to move around. Last year it almost knocked me off the ladder, at which point my wife said from now on we’re going to hire somebody to clean the gutters. Well, I’m a cheap bastard and, while I like to joke about getting older, in my heart of hearts I know I can still, with ease, do the things I did 20 years ago. Lost a step? Not I! Of course, I’m fooling myself. Just don’t tell me. This past fall we installed the Leaf Filter gutter system. I’ll probably do a blog about them later but for now I will just say that they are warrantied for life and are self-cleaning. So, while I didn’t have to worry about cleaning rain gutters this year, I did notice that the solar panels needed a good cleaning, plus there were a lot of dead leaves that had collected beneath them. Cleaning the solar panels and digging those leaves out went on my To Do List, which I actually took care of this last weekend.

Back to roof lighting. I somewhat shakily climbed up on the roof and connected my lights at the top of the roof line on the RV parking side. My roof slopes down towards the front of the house here so I ran the lights across the top of the roof line as far as the chimney. At that point I brought the lights over to the chimney, up and around, tracing the outline of the chimney, then back to the roofline which quickly makes a 90 degree turn where the garage is. I followed the roof line, making the 90 degree turn, and ran the lights that way almost to the end of the roofline before running out of lights about four feet short of the end of the roof. Next, I strung lights along the eaves of the free-standing roof over the RV parking area. More ladder work. Then I ran lights tracing the outline of the garage door. The last thing I did on day three was hang these really cool lights in our oak tree. They are blue lights on strings about fifteen inches long. At night the lights have a downward cascading effect, so it almost looks like blue rain coming down under the oak tree. A couple of neighbors commented on the effect so I am planning on buying more for next Christmas.

Finally, we come to day four of the build. This is reserved for yard ornaments. You know the kind I am talking about. A seven-foot-tall lighted Christmas tree, four or five deer of various sizes, a couple of them animatronic, Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, two or three versions of Snoopy and Woodstock along with the rest of the Peanuts gang, teeny tiny little Christmas trees, a Merry Christmas banner stretched across the front fence, colored spotlights to highlight everything. Every year I would have to drag this stuff out of boxes in storage and assemble it all. Not only was it a pain in the ass but it was time consuming, taking the better part of a day and a half to do all that and position them. A couple of years ago I got smart. I assembled everything as usual but then tied them together with the zip ties. We have a small basement under my workshop, behind the RV parking. I don’t use it except for storage. So now I leave all these characters assembled and simply carry them down into the basement. When Christmas comes along all I need to do is carry them upstairs, place them in whatever position I’m going to put them, stake them to the ground so they don’t blow over when we get our occasional high winds, and plug them in. That’s another thing that does take a little bit of time on the final day. There are more than two dozen different objects that have to be tied together and plugged in. I tend to plug everything together into groups. I plug those into a three-way outlet with extension cords then run that back to my 5-way plug set up.

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And, TA-DA, when I turned everything on Sunday night of Thanksgiving weekend all the other lights in the neighborhood dimmed, the transformers hummed, the new music box (having arrived the day before Thanksgiving) blasted out classic Christmas carols. Everyone seems to love the new song selection. The Merry Christmas banner I ordered came in the Monday after Thanksgiving. It was hung and lighted. And the remaining eight sets of lighted candy canes came in this past Saturday. Everything is hooked up and humming along merrily. I note that the other husbands the neighborhood are putting up their decorations, having been shammed into doing it by their wives after seeing my display. When the lights come on, I watch the little wheel on my power meter go from like 33-1/3 to a 45, possibly a 78. If you’re under 40 I’m not going to explain that. I’m already thinking about what I want to add for next year.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!