1995 - 2003
In June of ’95, our daughter, Emily, was born. The
following Thanksgiving , as a father, I felt compelled to
put up some lights up outside for her. This amounted to
600 clear mini lights placed on two Alberta spruce trees
in front of the house.
Back in the mid-90’s, there wasn’t a much of
a variety of mini light option’s available. Clear
or multi colored was pretty much the extent of it. Occasionally,
I did notice homes that had solid mini’s of red or
green, but I could never find them locally. I mentioned
this to my mother-in-law, who lived in Queens, NY. She discovered
a store after Christmas of ’96 that had solid color
lights available in red, green and blue. She picked me up
about 600 of each color. Back then, on sale was $4-5/strand
versus the $1 that can typically be had today.
In ’97, by incorporating these solid lights, our
display began to expand. On Thanksgiving Days, my brother-in-law,
Don and I started to utilize these solid color lights on
Douglas Fir trees planted out near the road. Over a few
years we managed to accumulate a few new solid colors, like
gold, purple and pink/white. By 2000, our light display
totaled about 6,300 lights and incorporated the front planters
and 8 Douglas Fir trees. That same year, my brother Brian
visited us at Thanksgiving for the first time. When Don
and I went out to do the lights, Brian (reluctantly) joined
us. We assigned him the duck house while we did the Douglas
Firs. It took him pretty much the whole day to put 1 strand
of a 100 mini lights on our tiny duck house.
Brian returned at Thanksgiving of 2001. When asked to help
with the lights, he replied, “Not if you’re
going to put them out on the trees near the road. Why don’t
you put lights around the pond?” Bingo. We did exactly
that and the rest is history. Bri didn’t return in
2002, but I did expand up to 7,800 lights – around
the pond of course. It looked very nice, with the reflection
on the pond. I new I was going to need more lights the following
year.
Since my outside circuits were maxed out, I needed to add
more external circuits to allow more lights outside. In
2003, for the first time, I added two 20amp, circuits specifically
for Christmas lights. I told Brian about it and he returned
that year. This was the first year we started putting up
lights before Thanksgiving Day. We proceeded to put up lights
until we started blowing circuit breakers. I quickly learned,
with Brian rubbing it in all the way, that we needed to
start planning and mapping out the display prior to actually
putting the lights up. In order to achieve our plans that
year, We ran one additional circuit out of the loft window
and finished up with 24,900 lights.
|
|
)
)