Many years ago, my buddy Jim Laird and I added a string of colored Christmas lights to the garden in preparation for a winter holiday party.
We ran the lights from a Douglas fir that stands at the dogleg in the driveway, where it turns up into the parking area near the house and barn. The lights hung about 10 feet above the ground and ran from the fir tree all the way down to the pump house, illuminating 75 feet of garden path below.
These were the old-fashioned lights with full-sized C-9 bulbs, pear-shaped in bright Christmas colors of red, blue, yellow, orange and green. They were the perfect seasonal addition and, since they added much-needed light to the nighttime garden, I never bothered to take them down after the holidays.
Within a week, I noticed that a few of the bulbs were missing.
At first I thought the bulbs had burned out but on closer inspection I could see that they were simply gone. We scoured the ground under the string of lights to no avail. I diligently replaced the bulbs with new, clear ones to tone down the look of the holidays. Every week, one or two or three more light bulbs would disappear.