“Christmas Vacation Part 2”

Did you see the hilarious movie “Christmas Vacation” years ago, with Chevy Chase? When the stress of the holidays begins to take its toll, rent the movie, pop some corn, grab a beer, and prepare for a lot of laughs! It’ll cure what ails you, I promise!

The Dixons are writing the sequel to that movie…look out, Hollywood! Last year we hired a tree expert to come out with his cherry-picker, and put the lights on the top of our 25-ft. blue spruce. It cost us $100, but we figured it was worth it, since it’s getting too dangerous for us to climb a ladder that high.

After the man left, my husband and I put lights around the rest of the tree and stood back to admire our efforts. It looked magical, and our neighborhood looks forward to seeing this tree light up every year. Two hours later though, the top lights all went out. The tree man came back the next day and changed the fuses on that section. He reconnected the lights, and voila! The entire tree lit up again…it was beautiful! The bad news is that the entire section went dark again after a few hours. My husband and I were quite frustrated, having spent good money for nothing. We ended up turning the tree off for the entire Christmas season.

Fast forward to this holiday season, and we again called the tree guy for help with the lights. (We made sure to buy all new lights this time!) Dave did a beautiful job, as did my husband. We ventured outside that night to bask in the beauty of the Christmas tree, and it really was glorious! There was just one tiny area where a strand of lights needed to be raised up just a little bit, to fill in a hole. My husband at first decided he’d deal with that the next day. However, a few hours later he was out in the yard with a ladder and a long pole, lifting that strand up. Well, the worst happened! Once again, just like last year, the whole upper section went out!

My husband has to be the most even-tempered person in the world. But he came stomping into the house, absolutely furious! He was mad at himself for fooling with the tree and not leaving well-enough alone. He used words I NEVER hear him use (I, unfortunately, use them a little more liberally!). I stayed out of his way, saying things like, “Yes, dear, I know how frustrated you must be!” Let me mention that I am “so over” that tree. It’s just gotten too big to decorate, and the hassle outweighs how pretty it looks when it’s all lit up. I thought that Tom might now reach that same conclusion. Either that, or a solution would come to him when he had calmed down.

The next day, Tom asked me, “Do you have an extension cord?” I burst out laughing, saying, “Chevy Chase has nothing on you!” The upshot is that we now have three electric cords going to the different sections of the monster tree, and the lights have now stayed on the entire time, even through a rainstorm, and also withstanding a grandson climbing around under the tree…gasp!

One more funny postscript to this story: The day after Tom successfully completed the lighting of our outdoor tree, we noticed a problem with the lights on our little artificial indoor tree. You guessed it! The top section went out! We’ve already added extra lights to other parts of this “pre-lit” tree over the years, and don’t want to add any more and overload the circuits. So we sit in our living room and admire our “Charlie Brown” Christmas tree, minus the lights on top!

They say there are no coincidences. So my question is this: what is the meaning of this situation, where first the lights kept going out on our outdoor tree. We finally got that fixed, only to have the lights go out on the top our indoor tree! If anyone has some thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them!

P.S.: I have fiddled with the settings on the “comment” section of this blog, in an effort to make it easier for someone to post a comment. Let me know if that’s made it simpler! Thanks, Mary