Season’s greetings, friends, and welcome to the third installment of Carole’s Creative Commotion! You may think it’s a little early for ‘season’s greetings’ but – au contraire, mon frere – you’d be wrong. As we dyed-in-the-wool paper crafters know, the holiday season is upon us NOW. While the rest of the world is baking in the August sun, we’re scooping up the latest Halloween papers and creating ghostly goodness. When people are putting away their flip-flops and adorning their porches with pumpkins? We’re creating garlands and gift tags. By the time civilians are trimming their trees, we’ll be up to our… um… voice boxes in Valentines.

What can we say? We’re ahead of the curve. We set the holiday trends that make the world a more fun and festive place to live. It’s tough, creative work, but somebody has to do it.

Thus, even though it’s ‘only’ October 18th, you’ll indulge me if I skip the chatter about ghouls and goblins and move on to the very important and emotionally-charged subject of… CHRISTMAS LIGHTS!

“Christmas lights”: that simple phrase is enough to strike fear in the hearts of those who know me well, and a reason the males in my immediate family (which accounts for everyone but me & the dogs) dread the Friday-Sunday of every Thanksgiving weekend. Why? Because that’s how long it takes me to get the Christmas tree up and lit. In most areas of life, I’d consider myself ‘Type B’. But Christmas tree lighting is different; they are my madeleines, my Rosebud, my Moby-Dick. Clark Griswold, c’est moi.

Here are my rules for a properly lit artificial Christmas tree:

1. Buy the largest pre-lit tree with the most bulbs per branch that your room can accommodate. If needed, make a platform for the tree with concrete cinder blocks. (This is what department stores do to show off trees to their best advantage.) If the tree you want is a bit too big for your room? Improvise. Squish the top branches and make it fit. For example (and yes, this is my tree…):
2. Using twist or zip ties, secure a couple of electric outlet strips to the trunk/pole of the tree. You never want more than three strands of lights plugged into each other or you run the risk of overloading. Not only can this create a fire hazard, it can also cause a short in your lights, which after all the work you’re going to do, is the very last thing you want.
3. Fluff out the branches of the tree. This should take you a long time. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong. You’ve got to make the tree look as realistic as possible (as in, not every branch can tip up at the ends) without having any gaps where you can see gaps through the tree to the back side.
4. Starting at the bottom, light the tree. Every single branch must be covered from base-to-tip-to-base, before moving to the next branch. Use light clips (green plastic thingies that look kind of like bobby pins) to avoid the the distraction of gaping cords. Work with the strand lit to ensure even coverage.
5. When you think you’re done, add at least two more strands. More is more and a tree can never be too well lit. Your tree should be so well lit, you don’t even need ornaments. As of last year, my tree had around 15,000 multi-colored lights on it. I’m still not sure that was enough. (And yes, there are two stars at the top of my tree; one just didn’t seem like enough…)

6. Stand back and marvel over your handiwork. Have a glass of wine (if you haven’t been driven by this process to drinking already) or cider. Then get out the rest of tree decorations and put those up.

I’m consistently amazed at how much Karen and I seem to have in common. She couldn’t have known about my Christmas light OCD when she released the very first Your Next Die. And yet what was it? A scalloped strand of Christmas light bulbs!Karen could not have spoke to me more with this stamp and die set if she tried. Here’s a close up of some bulbs, which I made more life-like with a coat of Glossy Accents. You can also see the pleated ribbon treatment I created by pinning the ribbon in place then running it through the sewing machine a couple of times.As for my aforementioned affliction, I think the only thing that might cure it is going back to a natural tree. Real tree branches can only handle so much weight, and certainly aren’t strong enough to handle the work out I put my artificial trees through. Believe it or not, I used to be a ‘real tree snob’ and pooh-poohed the fakers with their artificial trees. Then, about a dozen years ago or so, the price of real trees in my area seemed to sky rocket, and, well, I succumbed.

Enough about me. Tell me about YOU! For those of you who put up trees, tell me a bit about your lighting strategies. Are you a multi-colored or a clear light person? {I believe that’s almost as telling as whether you’re a dog- or cat-person, by the way.} Any hints or tips you’d like to share? As you can tell, this is a topic that takes up a lot of space in my wee brain, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Another thing I’m curious about: what are you stamping for, these days? Are you, too, already stamping Christmas (as I assumed earlier, for argument’s sake), or are you living in the here and now, and still stamping Halloween? Despite the fact that it’s going to make me seem like an unreliable narrator, I’m going to let you in on a secret: I plan to do a little more Halloween stamping over the next couple of weeks. After all, I have too many cute Halloween stamps I need to get inky (like Got Candy, Creepy Crawly, and the Cute Witch and Cute Kitty digi stamps), not to mention all the paper that’s getting old as I type this!

And for those of you who don’t put up trees or celebrate Halloween or Christmas, leave me a note anyway, even if it’s just to tell me I need an intervention. 😉 Karen will be giving away a Light Up the Holidays stamp and die set to one lucky person who comments before 11:59 p.m. EST, Tuesday, October 25th. My philosophy about comments is the same as my philosophy about Christmas lights: THE MORE, THE MERRIER! 🙂
See you next month on the 18th!

xo – Carole