Pick Your Hue

Thanks so much for all your kind comments on the previous post! It means a lot to me to have such a supportive community in times like this.

And now, to give you whiplash, we turn from the sober to the completely frivolous.

This year marks the first holiday season in which I am decorating my house with exterior lights. We'd always just slapped up a few wreaths and called it a minimally decorated day. However, after having to listen to a pipsqueak-sized chorus of dismay over the lack of Christmas illumination for a few years, I finally acquiesced. We would hang lights on two, and no more than two, bushes out front this year.

I even yielded to the kids' insistence on colored lights. I myself am partial to white lights, but I don't expect children to appreciate their understated elegance. As long as we continue to trim our Christmas tree with white lights, I am perfectly okay with colored lights outside.

We've decorated one bush so far. And by "decorated," I mean "sparsely trimmed only halfway down." Yeah, as it turns out I grossly underestimated the amount of lighting needed. While we were picking out more lights at the store today, Sean gazed longingly at the artificial, pre-lit display trees. "You know, Mommy," he said, "our tree would look so much better with colored lights."

I would say there is not a snowball's chance in hell of that happening, but I know better now. Check back in a few years and I bet our tree will have not just colored lights but colored lights that blink, shimmer, and do the hokey pokey.

Your turn: colored lights or white lights?