In the early years of our marriage, my wife and I bought a lighted Christmas wreath. The wreath was two feet in diameter and was strung with the old incandescent cluster lights. This wreath hung in our picture window of our first house and would make its way to the transom window above the front door of our second house. Over the years this Christmas wreath had become my favorite decoration to hang during the holiday season.

After two decades of usage and hundreds of bulb replacements, the wiring had become frail and our lighted wreath lit no more. During the pandemic, I tried to find LED cluster lights to restring the wreath with but they were nowhere to be found. So I tried stringing the wreath with normal Christmas string lights but they weren't practical for installing onto the wreath. So out of frustration, I gave up and spent the last two holidays expressing to my wife how I missed that Christmas wreath with all its glittering lights.

Gratefully, my wife never gave up looking for a suitable replacement of lights to string the wireframe of the old wreath. Without my knowing, she came across LED Christmas lights in the cluster style now being sold that are a perfect replacement for the incandescent lights of the old wreath. Last week, I came home and she presented me with our renewed Christmas lighted wreath. I don't think I've smiled in awhile as much as I did in that moment. As silly as it sounds, a level of Christmas joy had returned to me that I haven't felt in a couple years.

My wife would later tell me it took her two hours to string the lights around the wireframe of our old Christmas wreath. I suppose we could have purchased a brand new wreath to save the time in labor but it wouldn't have been the Christmas wreath. Instead, we have our old Christmas wreath restored and hanging in the window. I know for some it's just decoration. But for me, it's a reminder to be grateful for each year my wife and I get to hang this Christmas wreath and celebrate the holiday season together. I want at least another twenty years of this.

This article was originally published at BryanRuby.com.

Note: I've had a few people ask me for which lights my wife used for this wreath. They are the Ollny Low Voltage Cluster Lights 600 LEDs. Amazon sales them (affiliate link) but the last I checked they were nearly sold out.