The Joy Of Christmas

I was wrong about the leaves falling, they are still on the trees. Typical Houston, temperatures were in the low 30's for two nights and High 70's during the day. Here it is thirteen days until Christmas and yesterday some golfers were wearing shorts and polo shirts. No complaints here though. "The Madge" just got back from Dallas where she hung out with Caden, Erin and Brad. Erin had chemo on December 9th, so until the effects REALLY hit, the women got in some shopping, lunch and dinner. Yesterday and today should be Erin's tired days, then a few more mending days and by next Friday she should be back to normal. One of the best Christmas gifts we all are getting is knowing that Erin's last treatment is December 29th, then it's a few weeks of rest until radiation starts.
So "The Madge" gets home yesterday and tries to catch up with some missed TV shows, then as the sun is setting she plugs in the Christmas tree. The next thing I hear is "Jim, can you take a look at this tree? Most of the lights are not working." She was right, about 85% of the lights were out and in light numbers about 650 were dead. "The Madge" loves a well lit tree. I mumbled a few things about throwing the all lights out and buying fresh ones each year or getting a smaller tree with a fewer lights.
As I mentally prepared myself to jump into this mess I remembered that "The Madge" recently bought a gadget called Light Keeper Pro that claims it will fix any and all the problems associated with Christmas tree lights. Here's the weird thing, after watching the "How to" video on the internet I went over to the tree and removed a bulb, put the socket in the gun, pulled the trigger and ALL the lights went on. This thing actually works. I don't know how but who cares? We were happy for about ten minutes.

Darkness fell upon us. Oh crap. I tried zapping it with this miracle tool a few more times but nothing. Back to the original idea of removing all the lights, throwing them away and replacing them with some brand new sets. As I started to remove them from the top I discovered something very interesting. "The Madge" had strung the tree with fourteen individual sets of lights and rather than run the light strings in a continuous string she decided to plug them into one area totally independent of each other. A giant common plug receptacle.


I wouldn't have noticed a problem but the plug connection was "warm" to the touch. The lights were actually doing their job by shutting down before the tree caught fire. We made a few changes, plugged in the tree and sang "O Tannenbaum".