The Sun Sunnyvale's Newspaper Weaving tangled holiday webs By Deborah Taylor Hollis Although the holidays are a time for joy and light, the lights and the task of putting them on the tree are more reasonably associated with Dante's second circle of Hell--a nightmarish land of diminishing returns where fingers grow raw and numbed, curses abound and hatred for the family member who last packed up the lights is only tempered by thoughts of strangling them with those same little glowing strings of holiday spirit. My family's experiences with decking the tree frequently extend to threats of decking each other as we search the boxes for the first thing we must have--the darned lights. After 18 years of not only stringing my own tree but also occasionally helping my parents, I get a double dose each season, and frequently vow to convert to Judaism to avoid this annual disaster in the future. A great case in point is last year's tree trimming at my parents'. My husband and I blocked out three hours to get the fir up and sparkling and arrived full of good cheer and eggnog. We played carols, got a fire started and pulled out all the boxes--over 20 by my count. It took us a while to find the lights. Apparently, even though everything else had come off the tree first, someone found it more prudent to pack the lights at the bottom of the largest box; perhaps it was the same someone who decided that it was OK to pull the lights off the tree in one long string and ball them together until they resembled a Rubik's Cube. Twenty-plus strings were amassed in the ball, strings with double-end plugs,strings with single-end plugs, flashing strings, clear strings, lantern strings--the whole lot looked like a ball of schizophrenic twine. We sat down and started unraveling. It took hours. Some sets were so messed up that we had to pull from opposite ends of the room, wrap up what we got out, and then untangle them from the larger (and I swear pulsating) mass, while others simply broke apart from the strain. Once we got a set out, we had to plug it in to verify it worked. Few of them did. Do you have any idea how much time it takes to pull out each separate light and move it down the line? Or to find that you need a replacement bulb, but the set in hand is so old that there are no more plugs for it? This means you have to unthread the actual bulb and put in another one, pulling those little wires down just right on either side of the plug base. It can drain the holiday spirit out of you faster than mall shopping. Some sets we had to give up on completely--after 40 minutes of eyestrain it was better to just throw them out and buy more. Other sets, the old ones from my grandmother's day made in Europe or Hong Kong, are harder to help. Every year we scrounge for working bulbs or glue together another little carriage lamp cover that has broken. Angels and hurricane lights, faux candles and bubblers--each is more exasperating than the last to revive for another Christmas season. My warm fuzzy memories heat up and burn every time I have to find another replacement plug for the antiques. Hebrew school looks better all the time. Eventually, the tree is lit, and we begin hanging the ornaments; that is, if we can find them. They're not in the boxes marked "ornaments." Those are full of stuffed Grinches. The Grinches box is full of holly boughs. The holly box is full of empty shirt boxes and used bows. It doesn't matter who I ask in my family, nobody knows who packed up the tree last year, but the amount of finger pointing escalates into a near riot and drowns out any chance of hearing the Chipmunk Christmas album. That phrase "Oh what a tangled web we weave" has taken on new meaning in my family. So I issue this warning: When it comes time to box up the tree, don't let any of my relatives near it--and watch your own family closely as well. [ Back to Contents Page | Sunnyvale Sun Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, December 23, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.