25 days of christmas: day 3-putting up the Christmas lights part 1

Putting up Christmas lights on the house is one of my favorite things to do during the Christmas season. This post will be dedicated to a sort of "before" look at the lights themselves before they go on the house.

my trusty Bucket 'O Christmas Decorating Stuff....I couldn't think of anything more clever

New additions! Unfortunately they don't light up, but they are really pretty. Courtesy of Lowe's

Can I take a moment and say how much I love SAM'S. This 50 foot string of lights-$20. You can literally never find a deal like that anywhere else. But sadly they don't have a huge selection, but if you want to line your gutters, SAM'S is the place to get really long strings of lights for cheap. I saw similar strands for $40 at the Home Depot and Lowe's

Martha Stewart lights...I personally think she should stay out of the exterior lighting business, but I really needed strands of red lights. Being that LED lights have only been around for a few years it's hard to find plain white/blue/red/green. 

But, they're really cool looking. Although if you're looking at  C6 lights (which these are) and the usual 5mm (ones that you think of when you see LED christmas lights), they look the same from far away. But, up close they're more ascetically pleasing

All the strands laid out and ready to go.

Those are only about half the wires that I ended up using

New cool 12'' stakes I decided to use just to make things a bit different. I ended up putting blinking lights on them, just because I accidentally bought them a few years ago and they haven't found a home yet. This being because I think a whole display of blinking lights is annoying and distracts from the display itself. 

Well for now that's it. I unfortunately left my house in STL to come back to school before I could snap a few cool pictures of the lights hung up at night. So whenever I either go back or convince a family member to take a few pictures for me the Part 2 may not be for a few days.