Making VNB's Day

So VNB and I have a standing "feud" over the color that Christmas tree lights should be. I'm an all white girl, he's a multi-colored guy. For the past few years, as we've been learning each others' Christmas preferences and traditions (like you actually put small gifts _in_ the stockings (for me) and there's a train around the bottom of the tree (for him)), I've always won for the light color, primarily because a) I was the one that put them up (and/or purchased the replacement strands), and b) we had _far_ more white lights than we had colored.

But my white light strands have been dying slowly, but surely. Our plan was to replace each strand with LED strands as they died. That way we wouldn't have to make a huge investment in the expensive lights any one year, but we've eventually only have LED lights. But by the time we got lights on our tree last year, all of the stores were completely out of anything but outdoor LED nets. So, last year we made do with a bunch of half-working strands, then threw out anything that wasn't working completely when we put them away. This year we made it to the store a _little_ sooner (or they just had more this year), but they still didn't have the type of lights I would have preferred (small, white, non-faceted).

But beggars can't be choosers, so I did the best I could - large, faceted, white indoor-outdoor bulbs. I figured I'd put those on the inside of the tree and the little strands on the outside. Plus, with the larger bulbs, we wouldn't need as many lights so I could buy fewer strands. And my plan was working like a charm until I plugged in the first strand of the regular bulbs. That's when I made my discovery - LED "white" is a very different shade of white from that of regular bulb "white." And while shades of multi-colored lights wouldn't matter, shades of only white lights would look HORRIBLE.

So, as VNB will discover when he gets home from our dress rehearsal tonight, this year we have a compromise tree - five strands of large white LED bulbs, and two strands of small colored LED bulbs (that we bought last year for some reason I can't for the life of me remember). We could stand to get a few more of the colored strands to fill it out better, but it'll do for now.

Now I just have to find our garland and see if it works at all with colored lights. Unfortunately, I think it's in the china cabinet which currently has the dining room table pushed up against it (with all the chairs on top) to make room for the tree. The joys of a tiny house. And lack of forethought.