Why I Oughta...

For the first time , our blowmold 1 Santa Claus - sitting in his sleigh - has his three blowmold reindeer up and flying up, up and away.   He's in our front yard and all lit up with a brand new set of reins that are made of 30' of rope light from Menards.   I have been trying to think about how to get the reindeer to 'fly' for a number of years.  We didn't even put this set out last Christmas because I was caught in 'planning mode' too long and never got around to getting them to fly.  My initial design called for them to be 'wired up' between the ground and the large Maple tree in our front yard.  I went so far as to install two large metal eyelets directly in the trunk of the tree about 12 feet up in the air.  I was contemplating running some wire (kind of like the wire I used on the espalier system in the back ) from the eyelets down to some sort of grounding mechanism.  My initial thought was to buy one of those spiral metal thin...

When the 2017 Lionel catalog came out early in the year, like most years, I ended up pre-ordering a few items from TrainWorld that I knew would trickle in throughout the year.  That's what most often happens - starting around Halloween, the cars start to arrive.  But, just like last year, a car that has Christmas theme'ing arrived in January...post-Christmas. Here's the post from last February showing the Buddy the Elf boxcars that arrived late .  This year's late arrival is the car you can see above:  a Tell-Tale Reindeer Christmas Car. If you look closely, you'll see that this is part of the "North Pole Central Lines" and is marked with "Reindeer Transport Express" on the sides along with some drawings of Christmas symbols like teddy bears, drums and a brass instrument. So, you're probably wondering...what is a "Tell Tale" car?  Welp, it is a car with an animal inside that kind of 'ducks'.  In this case, it is a r...