#MicroblogMondays: The battle of the Christmas tree lights

One more Christmas-related post that I wanted to write down for posterity while it's still fresh in my mind (even if it's not exactly a micro-post)... ;)

If you think I'm a stickler for tradition when it comes to Christmas, you ought to meet my mother (I come by it honestly, lol).  My mother has always wanted the main Christmas tree in the house -- the one in the living room, where we open our presents on Christmas Eve and our stockings on Christmas morning -- to look like the old-fashioned ones from when she was a kid (& when I was a kid). (It's an artificial tree -- we always used to have real ones, until the year Mom started sneezing when the tree was brought in. Out it went, and that was the last time we had a real tree...!)  Most of the ornaments we use on that tree date back to the early years of my parents' marriage and my childhood in the early/mid-1960s -- a set of creamy balls covered in what looks like onionskin with little gold stars on them; red and green teardrops, purchased at the drugstore in a small town where we lived in Saskatchewan (1966-69) -- 99 cents for a box of six (the price tags are still on the boxes);  a battered red and silver aluminium star at the top; ropes of silver tinsel; and silver icicles, painstakingly hung from the tree branches in single strands. (They're difficult to find these days, so Mom takes them all OFF the tree every year and saves them for next Christmas.)  And big, old-fashioned, opaque coloured (incandescent) lights with foil reflectors. (But NOT yellow/gold lights. Mom hates them, and we've always had to swap them out for red, green or blue.)

Unfortunately, the lights Mom loves, while not quite as old as I am (!), are nevertheless getting to be pretty ancient. I'm sure they've had them at least as long as they've lived in this house -- which is now (gulp) 35 years.  This was brought home to me a few years ago when I plugged in one of the strings of lights to test them out before putting them on the tree (decorating the tree is usually left for me to do when I get there, partly to help out and partly because I love doing it) -- and a huge spark flew out of the electric outlet. I yanked the cord out and refused to have further anything to do with it. We made do with the remaining two strings of lights, running them back & forth across the front of the tree, instead of wrapping them all the way around (the tree sits in a corner of the living room, so the lack of lights in back is not too noticeable).

But more and more of the lights on those two remaining strings weren't working, and even when we tried to replace the bulbs, the new bulbs wouldn't work either. One bulb just went around & around in the socket without "catching" and tightening.  I started arguing that, tradition or not, the old lights had to go.  And every year I'd arrive, and we'd bring out the tree decorations, and the old lights would still be there, and the arguments would begin anew.

This year, I told my mother that if she wanted those lights on the tree, I would (reluctantly) put them up, but SHE could plug them in to test them and to turn them on & off. A full-blown family argument ensued. My sister has long agreed with me, and both her boyfriend & dh also agreed that the old lights were unsafe and needed to be replaced. (My dad, for the most part, stayed out of it!) My sister & I made a unilateral decision to go uptown to see what new lights we could find. (The town my parents live in, with a population of fewer than 3,000 people, boasts two small hardware stores.)

Of course, the strings of old-fashioned, large, opaque coloured incandescent bulbs my mother loves are in short supply these days. (Yes, it might be possible to find them on the Internet, but at this point, we didn't have time to wait for online delivery.)  At one store, we found coloured incandescent light strings, albeit with larger bulbs and designed for outdoors. At another, we found coloured LED bulbs, slightly smaller but more energy efficient and also cooler to the touch when plugged in. We took them home & tried them both out. The incandescents were almost blindingly brighter than the old ones, and they were also hot to the touch. The LEDs were slightly more opaque than the incandescents, and because they were slightly smaller lights, there were more of them on the string = more lights on the tree. The incandescents were too large (& hot) for the old reflectors to go on them -- but the reflectors fit perfectly over the LED bulbs -- and because the LEDs are cool to the touch, the old reflectors are far safer to put on them.

That clinched it. We didn't have quite enough reflectors to put on all the LEDs, so I focused on putting them on the bulbs at the front of the tree, and on the reds, greens and blues (thus downplaying the yellow & orange-y ones that Mom dislikes, which were difficult to swap out).

Mom was pretty pissed off at my sister & me when we left on our shopping trip -- but even she had to admit the new lights looked pretty good, especially once the reflectors were on.  Can you spot the difference?

Christmas tree with scary old lights, 2018.

Christmas tree with new LED lights, 2019.

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.