Why Putting Up The Christmas Lights Is Easier Said Than Done

I was on the air Saturday until 10, and on the way home I decided I had to take care of the yard at least one more time this year. So when I get home, I did some raking and leaf blowing, then mulched the leaves while I mowed my lawn. After I was done, I got the leaf blower back out and clean things up a little bit. Then I decided to take advantage of the nice weather and started putting up my outdoor Christmas lights.

About 10 minutes into the project I was ready to quit. It looks nice when it's done, but it seems to take forever putting them up. We have three bushes and a mini evergreen tree that we put lights on every year. Then there's four wreaths with lights on them that we put up every year. One goes on the door, another huge one goes on the chimney which requires the use of the ladder. The other two we put up on the back wall of our porch when we finally get them. We buy those two from our church's youth group every year so I'll still have to sting lights on them when they come in. They should arrive in a couple of weeks.

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We also have garland that outlines our front doorway which also has lights going through it along with two mini trees that we put on each side of the front door. Then we have the big C9 lights that go around the back patio. We also have a metal manger scene with a spotlight and an inflatable Golden Retriever holding a stocking that we put up every year. By the time I got all the lights up, ran all the wires, and made sure they all worked, that took me about five and a half hours. Still nowhere near what it used to take me to decorate the outside of our house.

When we first bought the house in 2001, we had these two trees that my wife told me were called Thuja Green Giants, on each of the front corners. We used to string lights through those every year. The bigger of the two trees alone had 1800 lights. That one tree used to take a couple of hours to decorate because I can only get to one side with the ladder, and the other side I had to use a pole with a hook on the end. We ended up cutting those two trees down which probably saved about four hours a year in decorating outside for Christmas.

I usually wait until Black Friday to put up the lights, but with everything that has gone on in 2020, and having decent weather on Saturday, I figured I would get it done while I had the chance. I plugged all the lights in to make sure they worked, and they did, now I'm just trying to figure out when to set up the timers to start turning them on every night. Do you think it's too early to turn them on now?