Lighted Christmas Tree Balls

I want to introduce you to a relatively new Greensboro Christmas tradition. It's described below by a Greensboro woman named Nancy Bartholomew:

We have a neighborhood here in Greensboro that has developed a Christmas light tradition to end all neighborhood traditions...Okay, well, maybe not to end all but at least to give all other neighborhoods a run for their money. Being a southern city, we're not going to forget where we came from. Any good tradition must include at least one southern necessity...Like Sunday Supper always includes Sweet Tea-the Sunset Hills Light Ball Display brings new sophistication to Chicken Wire. Now, I'm not saying the South has cornered the market on chicken wire, I'm just saying we've elevated it to an art form. We form the chicken wire into large balls, cover them with Christmas lights and then hang them from high atop our trees.

After reading about this in the paper for a few years, and cutting out the directions to make the balls for the last two years, this year we actually made several Christmas balls, kept one for ourselves, and gave the rest to friends. Tonight we drove down to Sunset Hills to see the streets where all the lighted balls are hanging, and it's just amazing. There are hundreds of them overhanging the street for several blocks, many way up high in the trees. The pictures and video I took really don't do them justice. Just in case any of you want to start a new tradition in your neighborhood, the directions to make the balls, copied from the Greensboro News and Record, are below:

1. Start with a 45-inch length of 2-foot-wide chicken wire, available on just about any hardware aisle. You’ll probably have to buy a roll and cut a 45-inch piece. Roll the chicken wire section into a cylinder shape and secure it by twisting the wire-ends together.

2. Now fold in the wire at the top and bottom of the cylinder to form something that looks like a rough rectangle. This step calls for patience. Just keep mashing the wire on each side until you have it in the shape of a ball. Don’t expect a perfect circle; only the lights will show once the ball is hung.

3. Light it up. Plug together two strings of 100-bulb mini-lights, usually available for about $1 each. Tie the female end (the one you’ll plug an extension cord into) to the top of the chicken wire glob with a few inches protruding. Then simply wrap the lights around the globe like its your Christmas tree. Tie the end of the light string to the chicken wire. Smiths’ tip: Test the lights before you hang the globe.

Hanging: You’re on your own here. Various methods of launching the tree balls range from attaching twine to a baseball and tossing it over a tree limb, to fly casting, to shooting string into the tree tops with a potato gun.

Just be careful. And have plenty of extension cords handy.