First Sunday of Advent

There's a rule here: no Christmas decorations before the First Sunday of Advent.

However, today all the gloves are off!

So I hit the ground running: walked the dog a mile, then put him on a leash on the grass while I took down the Thanksgiving items and put up the wreath on the door, the Santa Claus moon flag, the mailbox cover with the goofy moose on it, and the Christmas greens basket. At this point I let Tucker go inside and then started on the real work: the lights. I managed to get through this practically unscathed.

Decided I wanted to go back to the blue lights this year. Now Saturday at Lowe's I bought six strings of 100 blue lights on discount, but we still had blue lights, so I put those out instead. Thinking I should have put the Lowes lights on instead; some of these are badly faded and the blues don't even match. When I took a photo one string even looked green! Maybe I'll redo. Also put up the Christmas tree with the multicolor lights and the wreath, which has the multicolor seed lights on it. I could probably go out and get a new blue set for the tree, but I prefer the wreath in colors, and don't think I'll find them in blue anyway.

I didn't have a terrible time with the lights, but I do understand why my dad always swore while he did this!

Our neighbor Ashley came out while I was working on this, to take out little Diesel (he's some kind of Lhasa Apso or shih-tzu mix) and Nala, who's some type of Rottweiler cross, and we were chatting for a while. It was just her birthday and she'd been to Colorado as a birthday gift. They had snow and everything. She kept asking me if I needed help. Maybe I was just looking particularly decrepit this morning? I know I didn't feel decrepit; when I put up Christmas decorations I feel about fifteen (except my back didn't hurt this dang bad when I was fifteen).

A year or two ago James bought this set of four LED snowflakes that were on clearance for $7. I put them behind the three log deer as kind of a fun display. Didn't use any of the lighting effects, though; maybe will try them out later. You can twinkle and flash and make them chase, eight different effects in all.

Before dark I had also put all of the candoliers in the windows (blue lights as well; frosted for the upstairs and clear for the library downstairs), the multicolor changing bulb candle in the kitchen window, and the two flickering candles in James' "man cave." These eat up four AA batteries, but they will last through Epiphany, even though the flicker will be minimal by then!

My last step was to turn on the two flickering candles at 5:30 (they have timers and will keep them on for five hours) and put the batteries in the seed lights (this also has a timer that will turn on the same time every night and go off six hours later). And all is lit.

Also did my usual Sunday chores (towels washed, master bath cleaned, meds sorted for the week) and managed to sit and listen to some Christmas music and work on a story. It ended on a sniffle, so I think I achieved my goal. 😀