serious christmas decorators' blog

day 2: ho, ho, hooold on a minute!?!?!

 abuse

LESSON #1: The first law of Christmas decorating involves you (the light stringer), the strand of Christmas lights in question, and a touch of annoying fate.

A couple years ago on my family's "car-oling tour" of each others' houses, my aunts and uncles were standing around our living-room tree pointing and asking about different ornaments and such. All of a sudden, the entire top half of the tree blacks out. Silence fills the room. There is nothing more disturbing than a room full of people staring pitifully at a half-lit Christmas tree. I'm not talking one strand. I'm talking about the entire top half of the seven-and-a-half foot tree.

Somehow, the strand of lights disconnected itself in the rear middle of the tree. Could it have been sabotage? Maybe -- my entire family takes this "car-oling" tradition seriously. Maybe I should setup a video surveillance camera this year...

That was two years ago. Fast forward to 2008. Guess what happened today? I'm glad you asked... let me tell you:

All of our trees are unlit. There's nothing I enjoy more than stringing a tree with [(Tree Height)*100] Christmas lights. So today, I string the first round of 400 clear lights, followed by round two with 200 green lights. The final round involved 200 red lights. The lights fit perfectly on the tree, as each color's end-plug landed directly at the top of the tree. How often does that happen?!? But I should have known things were too good to be true. For some reason, we didn't decorate the tree after I finished stringing the lights. We decided to pull more storage boxes filled with Christmas stuff out of the storage shed.

An hour and a half later, as I walked through the living room, something caught my eye. I saw the Christmas tree. I saw clear lights. I saw green lights. I saw red lights. But the top 1/3 of the tree was only clear and green. One of the strands of red lights died in that span of an hour and a half.

Was it fate that told me NOT to decorate the tree as soon as I finished stringing the lights? Perhaps. I do know that I had to pull that strand of red lights off after giving it the jiggle test. You know that test? Grab the light string, forcefully jiggle it while saying, "Come on, you piece of..." electrical wiring. After ten minutes of the jiggle test, I pulled off the lights in question and gave them the good old "Yippee Kay Yay" whip motion. Still nothing.

Yet again, I had to dig through the box of lights to find the bag labeled "RED,"  test those lights (successfully), then restring the second half of the red lights. This time I waited two hours, and everything was still working. That's when I deemed it safe to start hanging ornaments.

Therefore, your Honor, I do not believe I should be found guilty of murder. I was not present at the time of death, but I do believe the string of red lights committed suicide, for I was unable to successfully revive it after several attempts.