Jumping the Season

I don't know how to preface this announcement, so I'm just going to come out and say it.

We have a Christmas tree up in our living room.

Actually, we have TWO Christmas trees up in our house, one in the living room (by the front window) and one in the spare bedroom.

That's right, this year we are about on the same page as Wal-Mart when it comes to putting up our Christmas decorations. But it's not our fault! Last year, we went to a play about Christmas and the winter holidays. Our friend was in it, and it was great. We were especially impressed with a set piece. It was a large, spiral tree that had various lights on it. As the scenes changed, different strings of lights would light up, giving a different mood impression. We were so enamored with this idea, we decided that we should try it at home for the next year.

We went out in the "after season" sale to try to get some inexpensive stuff, a spiral tree and some rope lights. We bought all LED lights, since we were wanting to move in that direction anyway. We are hoping that LED will cut down on our electricity bill this year.

All year long, the lights sat in a box. Last weekend, my Other Half decided that we needed to order some more strings of LED lights. I have been partial to solid color strings lately, which are hard to come by in a store. So we went on line to buy some more strings of lights. However, we didn't quite know what we would want until we saw what the rest of it looked like. So, we put up our spiral tree and hung the rope lights in the empty space inside. It looked pretty good. We decided that two strings of solid lights would round it out perfectly.

Instead of putting it all back away for a proper time (like Advent, for example), we opted to keep the tree up. It's a conceptual tree, not a real or a "I am fake, but I look real" tree. It's all lights. It looks cool, and I'm excited for it. Sometimes, we turn on the lights briefly just to see the glow. But mostly we keep it off. We don't want to be the weird neighbors that have their Christmas decorations up in October.