Blinded by the light…A Christmas story

Hand drawn Christmas cards

What is your favorite Christmas decorating chore?  I’d be willing to bet that stringing up the lights didn’t make the list!

Whether you simply put lights on a Christmas tree or decorate your home and yard ala Clark Griswald, this presumably simple chore will make any good person say words unbefitting of the holiday.

When we were kids the lights were big, giant multi colored bulbs.  They would break right along with all the super shiny ornaments that hit the floor with regularity—but they were easy to locate.

 Then came the mini bulbs on strings of a hundred or more, and when one bulb went out...they all went out.  Wouldn’t you just love to find the joker whose idea that was?  I doubt that he made it on Santa’s good boy list!

So you, like hundreds of others all over the country go on that futile search for the proverbial bulb in the haystack we are calling a Christmas tree.  The strings tangle, and as you spread them out, you plug in a new bulb in each slot hoping that the errant bulb will show it’s face. As you reach bulb number 99 you are hopeful…but you are out of luck.  Maybe the bulb you are using, as a tester is bad, or just maybe it’s the whole darned string. 

You walk to the trashcan and toss it out as you head to the store to buy yet another string of lights.  But wait, while you are there you decide to go the pre-lighted route.  It’s a new innovation for sure and one that will save the hairs on your head.  You buy it and go home and without profanity, you set up your Christmas tree. 

All goes well for a few years and then, without warning, as you plug in that tree you thought was your salvation from the condition known as tree light anxiety, you find that the whole center of the tree remains in the dark.  Something is wrong.  Now you have to check each light inside an already strung tree.  Impossible you say?  You are correct, so it’s off to the store to purchase some mini lights, and you my dear, are back where you started.

You wonder…should you go the LED route?  They are supposed to last a long, long, time.  There’s a rumor going around, however, that the designer is the same one who thought it was a good idea to share an on ramp with an exit ramp on superhighways.  You shrug it off and plunk down the cash.  HO, HO, HO