Keeping Up With the Klauses

Oh my G-O-S-H, you guys. When we were talking with our landlords about renting this house, they told us how Christmas is a big deal here, and that everyone on our pipe stem goes all out with the lights and decorations. They were not kidding, and it makes me SO happy. The pictures I'll be posting do NOT do it any sort of justice, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say it is fabulous!

I don't have any pictures of our outside decorating job in New Jersey. That's probably because it was only two strands of fifty lights that went around the pillars outside our front door. It was kind of sad, but there really wasn't more we could do when living in a townhouse.

This year though, this year things were drastically different. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving we went out shopping for lights and decorations and all sorts of things. The Friday after Thanksgiving and the Saturday after Thanksgiving we were all out there putting up our tons and tons and tons of decorations.

 Friday

Saturday

There are 7 houses on our pipe stem (8 if you count the one on the corner that faces the main street), and by the end of Saturday, 6 of us were lit up like...like...something that lights up really brightly. It was so much fun setting it all up. The guys (and some gals) putting up lights, the kids running around the street "helping." Halfway through Saturday we had this conversation:

Josh: This is great! It's like a two day long block party!
Me: No wonder I'm so exhausted.

Josh: Yeah. We've been partying it up for two days.

And we had been. But it was totally worth it because our house, and the street at large, looks amazing! (One of our neighbors even rigged some of his lights to move in time with some music that he has constantly playing - awww yisss!)

I'm telling you again, it really does look better in person.  Here are some shots of the whole street. I tried getting fancy with the panoramic feature, but it still falls short of seeing the whole thing in its glory.

Here are the numbers, since Josh took the time to figure them out. We have 2,466 lights up on and around our house. That is about 754 feet of light strands. And we aren't entirely sure we're completely finished. I did order some Snoopy lawn ornaments that we're waiting on for this year, that'll come in the next day or two. Apparently the thing to do is hit the after Christmas sales to stock up for next year.

Like I said, totally crazy (#embracingthecrazy) but totally amazing!