I am glad to see that we are not the only colored light people around!!! It is near impossible to find an artificial tree with non white lights on it
The outside of the house is just as colorful...a la Clark Griswald!
Growing up in the '70's and So. Cal where snow was only a dream unless you drove a few hours up into the mountains, my dad was enamored with white "flocked" trees... anyone else have those when they were kids? He insisted on colored lights to off-set the white. (I'll see if I can find some pics somewhere to post. I know I have them, I'm just not sure if they've been scanned yet...that project is still slowly happening...) - anyway. My grandmother on the other hand, would have a green tree, with enormous, almost outside quality colored lights on her tree. By the time I was a teenager, my brother, mother and I all rebelled one year and bought a green, non-flocked tree... and
- put white lights on it. What a breath of fresh air that was at the time.
Years and years of a bulky white tree, with lots of colored lights. The white lights on the green looked so elegant and simple... like you would see in some of the department stores. I've had a green tree with white lights ever since... BUT - I do enjoy colored lights outside on the house, and I line each of our windows with colored lights as well. So it's kind of a balanced mix that way. We get both colored and white lights.
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Alright - it didn't take me too long to find one... here we (my bro and I) are with my grandparents back in '76. The tree lots had the green trees up in the front, and then at the back they had rows and rows of these flocked trees. The stuff was nasty too. As the time wore on, it would flake off the tree and fall all over the carpet. And back then it was shag carpet still (my parents didn't upgrade to standard plush until '78 with their first home remodel project).
We would always get our tree around December 15th - and to this day, that's about when my DW and I get ours. When we lived in Michigan we actually went to a tree farm and cut it down ourselves. After my grandmother died (the one in the pic), she had had an artificial tree the last 2 or 3 years of her life and I got it. I used it a couple of years, but DW when we got married made me promise never again. She hates them. So our primary tree is always the "fresh cut" variety. We do have a small artificial one in each of the kids' rooms with their own ornaments, and I have a large artificial one that I put up at the office - but our "real" family tree in the living room must be the cut variety. And green. With little white lights.
cant wait for dw to come home from work and see her living room.
