Rookie mistakes

So, last night we set up our Christmas tree, after a fair amount of badgering from Andrew, who has wanted to decorate the tree ever since he and I started making decorations a few weeks ago (in my defense, I was getting desperate for art projects that wouldn't just add clutter to the house, and I didn't think very clearly about the consequences).

My mother kindly gave us one of her cast-off Christmas trees, a lovely 7.5 foot fake tree with a surprisingly narrow circumference. And having helped (i.e., watched) my parents put up the tree for years, I thought: How hard can this be?

Harder than it should be, apparently. We didn't manage to get the entire tree put together before bedtime, so we sent the kids off with the promise that we'd finish putting it together so Andrew could decorate in the morning. We managed to finish putting the tree together and then went about our respective tasks.

In the morning, I persuaded Dan to get the extension cord and actually plug the tree in, so Andrew could admire the lights. That's when we got our first inkling that something was not quite right. It took us ten minutes of searching to find the end of the first set of lights so we could plug it in, only to realize that the bottom row of lights only had one outlet end--and that end was plugged into the row of lights above it. Yes, friends--two PhDs between us and we didn't have the sense to make sure that we could actually plug the lights in to begin with.

That was our first rookie mistake.

I realized the second after bypassing the first row of lights and plugging in the next set of lights. This time, most of the tree lit up, with the exception (of course) of the bottom row, and the row just below the top of the trees. This is when I remembered that my dad always used to plug the lights in before putting them on the tree, to make sure they all worked. (I really wish I'd remembered this, say, ten hours earlier when we put the darn thing together).

At this juncture, Dan deserted me. He maintains that he had to go to work (which was true), but I'm guessing he was also happy to postpone the whole issue of the lights. I, however, am nothing if not stubborn and single-minded (usually at inconvenient times). So, I sat down to untangle (literally) our new set of problems. Evelyn was luckily playing quietly by herself while I worked; Andrew, on the other hand, thought he needed to start decorating the tree and had to be forcibly dissuaded from doing so until all the lights were working.

I started by taking the bottom row of lights off the tree, intending to replace it with a spare set. It wasn't until after I had done so (and taking lights off the bottom row of a fully assembled tree is no small feat, since I couldn't always see what I was doing) that I realized that the replacement lights wouldn't fix the problem; they'd just duplicate the same one. Sigh. So I restrung the original set of lights. I finally figured out that I could plug the first set into the end a few tiers above and plug all the lights into the extension cord, but it took an embarrassingly long time to figure this out--and to replace the strand at the top of the tree. I have to admit, I wasn't thinking very nice or charitable thoughts about Christmas trees or lights by the time that I was done.

However, we triumphed at last, and without having to take apart the tree (which was my initial, despairing fear). And it looks pretty good, if the balance of ornaments are all on the bottom half of the tree, courtesy of my 40 inch tree decorator. (Although I cheated a little there, too, moving ornaments when he wasn't looking). Evelyn has, so far, been more interested in taking bells and candy canes off the tree than decorating, so we'll see how the tree fares as the month goes on.