Christmas is the season of lights. One of my favorite parts of the season is decorating the house -- inside and outside -- with lights. Candle lights in the windows, star light in the dining room, lights in the kitchen and over the doorways to our bedrooms.
Since this was only our second Christmas in our house, we are still figuring out how we want to decorate, and we are in the early stages of acquiring decorations. One of the best ways to acquire nice decorations is to wait for the holiday to pass and then buy decorations that stores are trying to unload at a nice discount.
Last year we picked up a few things right after Christmas. David suggested that we get some lights to string along the deck. We use the back entrance to the house the most, and we can see the deck from our family room -- so buying lights was an easy decision. I tend to be a white light person, David pushed for colors. He won. Oh, and the lights we bought have something like 15 settings -- we can select anything from strobe, to Vegas, to night club, to seizure-inducing flashes. Lovely.
To be fair, when we got the lights on the deck and the tiny trees with lights along the sidewalk and a tangle of outdoor extension cords and the light sensor all set up, it was very nice. We got a beautiful snow just a couple of days after we had everything set up, and the lights looked great through the snow. We all enjoyed watching them from the warm family room.
And then one night I noticed that one of the strands was not lit. I thought it might have been due to the amount of snow piled on the connections. We've had some snow this winter.... But then the whole length of lights was out. We had had some difficulty with the light sensor timers we used on all the outside lights. However, the little trees along the walkway were on the same timer as the porch lights and they were still lit.
We let it go for a few days until one of us had the opportunity to be on the deck in daylight and check out the electrical anomaly. David got out there first. He suspected foul play. In particular, he suspected a squirrel.
David is not a big fan of a squirrel that's been hanging around our deck. The squirrel (or squirrels?) has pulled petunias out of pots, actually chewed on deck railings, and is generally a pest. He reminds me of the fearless squirrels you encounter on college campuses. This squirrel has actually stood outside our sliding glass door, placed small claws (do squirrels have claws?) on the glass, and stared at us. Odd.
So it turns out that it appears that the squirrel chewed through the electrical cord of our Christmas lights -- not in one place, but in three different locations (see pics above). No squirrel carcasses were found. Surprisingly.
I'm still a little pissed about it -- the destruction of our new lights, not the lack of frozen bodies. What kind of scrooge eats through wires to kill our Christmas joy?
