I love to put up my Christmas decorations the day after Thanksgiving. I refuse to put them up before Thanksgiving, and doing it the day after gives me the maximum amount of time to enjoy them. Well this year, it just didn’t quite work out to get them up on Friday. I didn’t mind too much though and just planned to get them up today. My hubby helped me get the tree up and then volunteered to play with Miss while I proceeded to decorate.
I plugged in the lights on my wonderful prelit tree. The super convenient and very beautiful tree that I was so excited to buy last year. Background: I used to have a tree that was given to me by a friend in graduate school when she and her husband upgraded. It was so great to have that tree for free as a poor graduate student. It was a full-size tree and it served it’s purpose, although it was not very lovely. Once I had all my beautiful ornaments on it, you could barely tell that it was hideous underneath. So I kept that ugly hand-me-down tree for 10 years, and when we moved from North Carolina, I decided it was time to let it go and get another one. After our last Christmas in NC I didn’t even pack the tree away in the attic. I hauled it directly to the Goodwill, knowing that I would buy a new one for the first time when we relocated to our new home. Last year was the year, and I splurged on a prelit tree. I was so excited and it was perfect.
That was last year. Unfortunately this year one of the strands of lights shorted out and only half of it lit when plugged in. This left a band of unlit tree about two thirds of the way up from the bottom. The tree has a warranty though, so I just called the company, thinking I would get them to send me a new tree. Haha. The woman gave me suggestions on how to fix the problem (check the fuses and make sure none of the bulbs were missing or loose) and then told me that, if these measures didn’t fix the problem, they would send me a new strand of lights. Strand of lights??? Not a new tree. Shoot. So I checked every bulb on that strand. Ben changed the fuses even though they looked fine. I really didn’t want to have to string new lights on the tree. I thought my days of stringing lights on the tree were over. But no. The problem was not a loose bulb, nor was it a blown fuse. The problem was a piece of junk strand of lights, which would need to be replaced.
I decided to just go to the store and get a strand of the same kind of lights for $4 instead of going through the rigamarole of getting new lights through the warranty. Then I went through the tedious task of unstringing the lights that came on the tree. This wasn’t your ordinary unstringing either. When I put lights on a tree, I loop them around a bit, but it’s not all that complicated to get them off again. Well these lights were so wrapped and twisted around every branch of the tree they might as well have been super-glued! Alas, I finally got them off and strung my new strand on (much more loosely I must say), only to find that there was a chunk of tree that my new strand would not reach to cover. What did I do, you ask? Without hesitation I asked my husband to help me turn the tree around to put that bare patch right where it belonged, facing the corner. I guess the rest of the decorations will be put up tomorrow…
