We've only lived in our house for three years and it's al-ready being rewired. Yep, that roll of all-to-familiar yellow wrapped wire made it's way out of the basement recently and was put to good use in the name of spreading a little Christmas spirit and joy.

I can still hear him just like it was yesterday, “This year I'm doing this right,” chimed my other half while his creative wheels were turning one night. “I'm not tripping over those cords like last year!”

Yep, it was that time again. Time to light up the Harris house on top of the windy hill for all to see. But this year he was going to do it without those easy to trip over and get tangled in extension cords, he said.

Our house is now officially extension cord-free. A little Black Friday rewiring has fixed us for good.

Most get excited about Black Friday shopping for those great Christmas deals but that other half of mine was raring to get to the do-it-yourself store so he could purchase a few needed supplies for the rewiring project he was about to embark us all on.

Now, with receipt in hand, I think it would have been cheaper to buy 25 extension cords. So I asked the light stringing man about spending so much money on this project.

“How many extension cords could we have purchased for this amount of money?” I asked as we walked out with seven gadgets he needed.

“Two really good ones and a few more if they were cheap,” he matter-of-factly told me about the different quality extension cords out there these days.

This is coming from the man who made me buy all new garland this year because he threw my other away while taking down the decorations last time.

“This stuff is cheap,” he grumbled as I caught him stuffing it into a trash bag destined for the dump.

I got it during an after Christmas sale but evidently it wasn't up to the hubby's quality expectations.

If he was going to string lights, the garland was going to be of better quality, he informed me a few months ago.

He might fuss and grumble about the lights as they go up but, give me a break, this is the man who also talks about next year's lights the day after he hangs this year's. He's already got his game plan mapped for next year.

“Each year we'll add something knew,” is his philosophy.

By Friday evening, I had had enough. It was hard to keep up with him and my fingers were bruised and sore from being stabbed by unruly “new” garland and I had glitter from my nose to my toes.

But back to the wiring, earlier that morning he had counted light strand ends and designed a plan to have them each have their own “homemade” receptacle (weather proof and all) attached to this underground wire he'd install and bury in the ground without killing the grass.

Let's not forget how important it is to save the grass! That stuff is like gold at our house. So all afternoon he dug a small, narrow trench around the house so that he could easily lay the wire in the ground.

It sure looked like a lot of work to me for a few (haha) strands of lights. “It worked fine last year why did we have to do something different?” I thought to myself as I watched him scuf-fle and scoot from shrub to shrub with his “electrical boxes” and then through my mulch bed.

Obviously, he was on a Christmas mission and at the end of that long day he had finally succeeded.

The job was complete and everything terminated into a store bought remote control handy-dandy Christmas light box, as I like to refer to it.

Today, each time I hit the button on the remote, I feel like I'm about to have a Clark Griswold moment while my real “Clark” peers from the house and grins as those lights start to twinkle.

Me, I just hold my breath until the hill lights up.

“Yes, they worked another night,” I mumble as I sigh in re-lief.

“Hallelujah!” is what I yelled the very first time they blinked on. And the little one, she was a tot with few words but her big blue eyes showed the real reason that light-stringing hubby of mine works so hard to make those lights work each year.

After the long and tiring day all the little one could muster was, “These nice Daddy. Oh, these nice!”