Santa's Little Helper

We put up our Christmas lights right after Thanksgiving, as usual. As before, they're completely LED lights, which means they use almost no power. We haven't noticed any change to our electric bill with the lights on or off, so whatever power they use must be pretty trivial.

The only difficult part is actually putting them up. We try to do all three floors, but this is a tall house and I'm still waiting for my 21st-century jetpack. We got a really long ladder from Home Depot, but it almost causes more problems than it solves.

For one, it's a fiberglass ladder, not aluminum. That means it doesn't conduct electricity -- which is good -- but it's also really heavy, which is bad. Combine a heavy-duty 32-foot ladder with damp soil and a sloping yard and you have a recipe for disaster. It's too heavy to move single-handed, so Kathy and I have to coordinate moving it, and we're always afraid we'll smash a window. There goes the original stained glass.

So we use our medium-sized aluminum ladder combined with a long pole. Each year I jury-rig a pole with a bent hook on top that helps hold the Christmas lights. Then I climb up the ladder to about the level of the second floor and use the pole to stretch a string of lights up to the top floor. The housepainters put little cup hooks under the eaves, so all I have to do is catch the wire on each little hook. Piece of cake, right?

The process takes maybe 3-4 hours, but it's relatively safe and repeatable. This is the second or third year that we've done it this way, and it seems to work. Taking the lights down is even faster, the biggest danger being dropping the lights onto the sidewalk from three stories up. Even LED lights won't survive that fall.