Mini-Lights Make You Feel Like A Dim Bulb

The Christmas season fills me with peace and inner joy, at least during the 10 or 15 minutes every December when I am NOT fiddling with strings of mini-lights.

During the other 700 hours, I am filled with a burned-out, shorted-circuited kind of feeling, while I reflect upon some of these deep spiritual questions:

* Can you fix a defective string by picking it up and shaking it really hard?

* Or twirling it above your head like a lasso?

* Or smacking it with a hammer?

* Why do they even bother to provide replacement bulbs, since we can never figure out which bulb to replace anyway?

* Are mini-lights manufactured by the same people who made the Russian space station Mir?

* How can a string of mini-lights work perfectly well in January, and then somehow “break” over the next 11 months while sitting untouched in the attic?

* How can a string of mini-lights work perfectly well when you test them in the kitchen, and then suddenly “break” as soon as you carry them anywhere near a Christmas tree?

You now the kind of lights I am talking about. Mini-lights are those small, perky little indoor-outdoor lights that people started using back in the 1970s when the energy crisis forced us to quit using the big Christmas bulbs. Those big old colored bulbs sucked up the energy, but they were handy. You could use them year after year after year, occasionally screwing in a few new bulbs. But mini-lights are sensitive, nervous little creatures. If someone walks past your house and sneezes, they flicker off.

I thought I was the only one who had mini-light problems until I went to a friend’s house for a dinner party last week. Let me try to reconstruct some of the dialogue, although admittedly I drank too much nog for total accuracy:

Guest: Nice tree. Why don’t you turn on the lights?

Host: Oh, you don’t want to see the lights.

Another guest: Sure we do! Turn on the lights!

Host’s spouse: (grinning) Yes, honey, show them the lights. They’ll be very impressed.

Host: (reluctantly) Well. OK. (Plugs in the lights. The bottom third of the tree lights up).

Guest: That’s very … festive!

Host: (sheepishly) We’re having a little problem with the upper strings. They were working fine when we put them on.

We guests were supportive, having mini-light problems of our own. The host mentioned that his grown children would be absolutely bedazzled when they arrived home to see this spectacle. After various discussions about how to solve this problem, somebody came up with the only practical solution, mini-lights being what they are.

“Just make it like a big lighting ceremony,” said a guest. “Throw the switch and say, ‘There! How do you like it?’ And then when they say, ‘Umm, but, dad …’ then you say, ‘What? What’s wrong?”’

Of course, they could also go out and buy new strings, which is what I did this year. Being a guy, and a particularly cheap guy at that, I did this reluctantly, only after carefully twisting and tightening every single bulb on all three of the 100-light strings that mysteriously broke while in the attic this year. Then I took a spare bulb and tried replacing each of the 300 bulbs, in turn. This didn’t work, mini-lights being what they are.

So I finally threw those strings in the trash and purchased three new strings, the kind with a guarantee that if one bulb goes out, the others stay lit. I still felt bad about the wastefulness of it all, but at least these strings worked as advertised.

Until Monday. That’s when exactly half the bulbs in each string winked out. I couldn’t believe it. With a heavy heart, I went out into the front yard juniper bushes to laboriously try tightening each stupid bulb, one at a time, until …

Until, I got to an empty socket. And another empty socket. And another empty socket. I stared in disbelief. There were only two explanations for this. Either a vandal had walked past and ripped out three bulbs in an attempt to play with my head, or else the mini-light manufacturers have somehow invented a way for bulbs to spontaneously eject themselves, also in an attempt to play with my head.

Or maybe somebody just walked past and sneezed. This is the most logical explanation, mini-lights being what they are.