To C9 or not C9?

So we drove around tonight looking at Christmas lights. There are quite few up and it was a fun outing. I think our house looks awesome this year. Last year all we had was some clear C9's. The lights were given to us from some friends who do major bargain shopping and they cleared out Lowes of thousands of dollars worth of Christmas decorations for .05 on the dollar. The lights however were kinda intense. C9's can be bright and these strands had 25 lights on 16 feet of wire. So needless to say last year I had a few fears going through my mind. Besides my power bill I was afraid an airplane would mistake us for the airport and try to land. Can you imagine the news headline, "Christmas lights reek havoc on air traffic" "Breaking news as we go live to the scene." "Sue, what is happening there in that small neighborhood?" "Well Stan, as you can see (camera pans around to show several airplanes lined up in the street) this house right here was so bright the pilots thought the runway had been moved and proceeded to land" "FAA officials have not commented yet but we were able to speak to the owner briefly several moments ago" (clip from earlier) "Sir, what were you thinking?" Me: All I wanted was to put up Christmas lights! (tears roll down my face)

Since we barely avoided catastrophe last year we figured we shouldn't tempt fate a second time. The only question was what did we want to do? I thought that it would look really sharp if we replaced the clear C9 bulbs with red and green. I did this with Kira's grandparents house and it looks great. The only downside to that was we would have to replace 150 bulbs. Let's see, divide that by four bulbs in a pack and $ .96 a pack comes out to be $36 in just bulbs. No fun. Then Kira had a brilliant idea. She suggested we keep the clear and add red. I would like to say I'm joking but heavenly music literally started playing the moment she said it. Pure inspiration.

So I single handedly cleaned Lowes out of every single red C9 bulb they had. Sorry to everyone out there who showed up after I did. I added a few windows and Kira is the sole inspiration for how great our front door looks. The large ornaments were .97 at Wal-Mart. The pictures do not do it justice but I think you can get the idea.

So our house is the sharpest looking one on our street so far. What we lack in quantity of lights we make up for in quality! :)

On a family note the kids have been under the weather again. This time it is a cough that comes with a fever. We have just been taking it easy the last couple of days. We have watched The Polar Express probably ten times. The kids don't know it yet but we have tickets to go this year. I am so excited, we wanted to go last year but we didn't call in time. Kira called about a month ago and they still had a couple of spots. http://www.thetrain.com/

Kira has crocheted us some way cool hats to help with the cold weather in Arizona. Don't they look adorable?