A Christmas Tree- it’s not even Hallowe’en yet!

Everyone always loves the Christmas Tree in the church parking lot, it’s probably the best looking tree in town! But when we took the lights off it in early January we realized that the 30+ year old strings of lights that our electrician made up have seen better days- many of the sockets are broken and the insulation on the wires is starting to crack. We don’t want to set fire to the tree or have anyone get a shock, so we need to replace them.

Unfortunately most of the light strings you find nowadays are LED, but I refuse to put LED lights on our tree- they are so harsh compared to the lovely, soft light you get from our old-school 7W incandescent bulbs. Luckily I found a place where I can buy 500ft rolls of wire with sockets pre-installed every 15″ that will take the same C7 bulbs we have always used. We will have to cut the rolls and make them up into 100ft lengths that can be wired into our existing portable breaker panel for the tree, and we will have to add the bulbs, but they should then last us many years to come.

So June and I spent a happy couple of hours this afternoon testing all the old bulbs and harvesting the ones that still work from the old strings so we can put them on the new wires when they come. Incandescent bulbs are getting pretty hard to find so I want to reuse as many as we can (though I have ordered a bunch more to replace the ones that don’t work). We should end up with 10 strings of lights with 80 bulbs per string- so we have another few hours of screwing bulbs in in our future when everything arrives, but it’ll be worth it 😉