Rigged for Christmas

 19 Dec 25:

The front yard and porch are rigged for Christmas. While mostly land oriented, there a few nautical elements mixed into the display. The center piece flagpole Christmas tree is held up by a decommissioned mast from a Lightning. A windstorm shortened it when we lived in Texas but we've had it since Corpus Christi - Yuma - Keller - Navarre and now Smithfield. 

A good story good along with the flagpole. Right after Skipper and I got married, we were downrigging the Lugger at the downtown parking lot where we launched for day sails on Corpus Christi Bay. We were approached by someone who asked if we wanted a Lightning mast and some spare hardware. I started to say no thanks but Skipper elbowed me and whispered "flagpole" to me. So we got the gent address and drove over to his place to look at the flagpole. It had a tiny bit of saltwater corrosion but would make a good flagpole, so we negotiated a price for the mast. He ended up throwing the hardware in for free just to lighten up the load at his garage. We tied the mast to the trailer frame and made our way home, and had the flagpole up the next day. 

Because I'm sure that you want to know, I'll tell you that the way we step the flagpole is to dig a hole about 1-2 cinderblocks deep, offset the cinderlocks from each other a bit and drop the flagpole down through the large holes in the cinderblock. We also build a circle of castlewall blocks around the flagpole, stacked about 4 high and add 2 more cinderblocks. Next we buy a bunch of bags of pea gravel and start filling in and around the cinderblocks, checking vertical on the flagpole as we add more gravel. The cinderblocks and gravel lock together to hold the mast steady, it can move a little in a heavy wind storm and if it does, we go out and wiggle it back to vertical. With this method we can lift the mast out of the gravel when move, which has happened five times since we got the mast.

For the yard trains, we added some local historic railroads since we got to Virginia, the Seaboard, plus the Chesapeake and Ohio. We like to add another car, engine or caboose every few years.

The wreath we have had since 1986, Skipper put in new lights this year.

Happy Holidays!