Alaskan Christmas 2023
Preparing for Christmas in Alaska
We do live in Alaska, which does get a fair amount of snow in the winter, so we decided to decorate the house and property to make it feel more festive for Christmas. The Alaskan days get long and dark so some good Christmas cheer makes everything merrier. Planning the outside lights and decoration had to start in early November as the snow starts to stick around sometime around mid-November. This meant that all the outside light and adjusting them as needed would have to be completely done before then as parts of them will be buried under feet of snow before we would have another chance. Luckily we went all out with Christmas lights in the past so we had an idea of how we wanted it to look. We had also upgraded most of our lights to LEDs to save energy and we had brought all those rolls of lights with us. I wanted to use bigger lights on the front of the house so we bought commercial grade C9 lights for it. The house has a 17/12 pitch roof with the peak being 39 ½ feet above the ground so I wanted good lights and not the el-cheapo ones as replacing them later would be a major pain.
The lights on the house went easier than we expected as I just hung the lights using the top floor window and pulled them to the sides from below. I would have preferred to outline the end of the house, but there is no way to reach the top with the ladder or to walk on that steep of a roof. It still turned out great. Since the lights were low electricity draw strands we were able to hook them all together so one plug controlled all the outside lights. I ran lights across our driveway using the tall trees so that they wouldn’t get hit by our trucks or the antennas on top of them. The allowed us to light up the trees that are in between the driveway and the road. We planned on adding more lights and our Christmas “JOY” cutout, but I wasn’t sure where to put them where they wouldn’t interfere with our winter snow removal operations, so we opted to wait until next year.
We ran additional lights further up our driveway past our parking area as well as up the outside stairs. From there we hung more lights leading out to our firepit area so the trail would be well lit for anyone who joined us by the fire later. We planned on having friends over once in a while to enjoy some hot chocolate by the fire. We also planned to have an early Christmas get together so the friends and neighbors could have some fun.
Christmas Get Together
Our get together was fun as our son had come up to visit so he got to join us. We had lots of goodies including smoked cream cheese dip, meats, crackers, homemade hot chocolate, chips, homemade salsa, and many other goodies and drinks. The temperatures stayed in the typical mid-20’s so it wasn’t bad at all. Jessica had a friend over and we had a few visitors stop. We had planned the date a few weeks out and the unpredictable Alaska weather decided to dump snow so most people were busy plowing and dealing with that so they couldn’t stay long. Jessica and her friend had snowball fights along with doing some sledding while we kicked back by the fire with some Christmas music. It was a good relaxing night and we all had lots of fun. It was also a good learning experience to see what we needed to change to make things better for next year as this was the first Christmas in the house. We were technically in it the prior year, but we had closed on it on December 23rd so we couldn’t do any Christmas stuff other than put up a small tree and a couple strands of lights.
Christmas Dinner
Originally, we had picked up a ham at Costco for Christmas, but a grocery store in town had a good sale on prime rib so we splurged. We love prime rib and I’m glad we found the sale as that was way better than ham. It was slow roasted to perfection in a heavy hickory smoke after marinating in a dry rub for three days, so the flavor was amazing and went throughout the meat. Prime rib was always one of Jeffery’s favorites, so it worked out for him. We also opened our presents early while he was here. The ham came in handy for the dinner on Christmas day itself and for a few days afterwards with several delicious meals. The Northern Lights also made several appearances so we got some good pictures of us with the lights.
The Northern Lights
The Christmas Decor
Plans for 2024
Christmas 2023 was fun and festive and all the decorating really helped cheer up the long dark nights. Overall we did really good at guessing where the outside lights needed to go so we mainly need to continue adding onto them for 2024 along with adding a few displays since we not know where the need to go. We have some improvements planned for the firepit area as well and we should have many projects finished before. We are looking forward to 2024 and will start picking up additional lights and stuff before it’s time to decorate again.
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