The Ladder Stayed in the Shed This Year, and My Porch Still Looks Like December

Every December it was the same routine. Drag the ladder out of the shed, prop it against the wall, and spend an afternoon clipping a line of bulbs along the gutter while somebody stood at the bottom telling me to be careful.

And every December the result was the same too — a neat row of lights that looked exactly like the neat row of lights on four other houses down the road.

I do not mind the cold, and I do not mind the faff. What I mind is being up a ladder on wet brick in the dark, which is realistically when most of us end up doing it.

So last year I made a decision. The roofline lights would stay in the loft, and whatever went up instead had to go up from the ground.

Which left me looking at the one thing already screwed to the wall beside my front door: the bracket that holds a basket of petunias all summer and then sits empty from October onwards.

It was at head height. It was already taking weight. And it had been doing nothing for three months.

That turned out to be a surprisingly specific thing to shop for. Almost everything festive is built to be strung along something — a run of fence, a length of gutter, the edge of a roof.

I wanted a single display that hangs from one point and does the whole job by itself. That is how I ended up with the Crystal Cascade Hanging Light.

In daylight it reads as an ornament rather than a string of bulbs — a lit top section with crystal drops falling away beneath it. It is the sort of thing you would notice on a porch in October as much as in December.

After dark it does something I had not expected. The drops catch the light and throw it around, so a fairly small display covers a lot more wall than its size suggests.

Hanging it took about as long as hanging a basket. I ran the cable along the same route the doorbell wire takes and then left it alone until it got dark.

No ladder. No clips. Nobody standing on a wall with a staple gun.

There are six to choose from: Icy Snowflake Top, Warm Crystal Globe, Blue Crystal Glow, Snowman, Santa and Cardinal. I went for the snowflake, because it still looks right in January when I am not quite ready to take everything down.

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If you have more than one hook — a porch, a back door, a shepherd's hook in a border — the multi-packs work out considerably cheaper per display.

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I bought a second one for the back door, which sits under a covered walkway and had never had any decoration on it at all — because nobody wanted to carry a ladder round there either.

The Crystal Cascade Hanging Light is £34.99 at the moment instead of £69.98, and the four-pack brings it down to £22.50 a display.

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