O Christmas Tree

Rocket Boy has been gone for over seven months now, and in many ways I've adjusted. I don't spend all my time fussing about being the only one to cook dinner, the only one to do the dishes, the only one to take care of everything that needs attention. Mostly I just do it. If it's something I don't know how/don't want to do, I leave it until Rocket Boy's next visit. But then comes Christmas, and suddenly there are a lot of things I can't really set aside until he gets here. True, he's arriving the night of the 21st, and we could do all the gift shopping and write all the cards and put the tree up and decorate it on the 22nd and 23rd and 24th. We could, but that would be awful. I want to enjoy his visit and enjoy the holiday, not just work the whole time. So I got the cards done early, and I'm basically done shopping. I've made six batches of cookies. There's a holiday cloth on the coffee table and a semi-holiday tablecloth on the dining room table and a wreath with a red bow on the front porch.

Then there's the tree. We have a very elderly fake tree, probably from the 1960s. The little instruction booklet that came with it (which of course Rocket Boy still has), looks very old-fashioned. It doesn't have a date, but on the front, under this nice picture, it says this: "Created and manufactured by British Crown Colony of Hong Kong for the S. S. Kresge Company, Troy, Michigan 48084." I searched the internet for something similar and found a four-foot version (ours is six-foot) on ebay which identified it as being from the '60s. So our tree is probably at least 50 years old. It still looks nice from a distance, but in reality it's falling apart. And it's Rocket Boy's job to set it up, and fix the parts that break, and put the lights on. Not mine, Rocket Boy's.

Only this year, it's my job. Mine and the twins' -- they've helped a little. They went down in our scary basement with me to fetch all the Christmas stuff, and carried most of it upstairs and into the house for me. Kid B went back down with me when we realized we were missing the most important box of ornaments and the little folding table that the tree stands on. I assembled the tree myself while they were at school, using this little diagram and trying to remember all the things Rocket Boy has told me about the tree over the years.

I wanted to put the lights on before my book group came, on Monday, but I discovered that the lights were not in any of the tubs and boxes we'd dragged up from the basement. "They're in a gray storage container," Rocket Boy told me. Tuesday morning I went back down the concrete stairs, past the spiders who were somehow NOT all dead, even though it's freezing cold, and in a corner of the basement, on the highest shelf, was an unmarked gray storage container with the lights in it. But when I brought the lights up and looked at the tree again, I realized that it had lost a branch already. When I tried to put the branch back in its slot, the slot broke apart in my hand. Every year Rocket Boy repairs a bunch of these slots, and every year more of them break. He solders them back together, but that's way beyond me. I decided that I would buy brown duct tape and tape the branch and the broken slot back together and he could fix them for real later. But I made the mistake of telling Rocket Boy my plan. "Don't do that," he scolded me. "Duct tape will make everything sticky. Use a hose clamp."

A what?

You can sort of see a hose clamp in this close-up tree picture, the little metal thingy around the base of one of the upper branches. That's the branch that broke off. Below it is the branch that broke off when I was putting the hose clamp thingy on the upper branch, and you can sort of see that the lower branch now has a hose clamp thingy on it too. I put them on using a thingy that's sort of like a screwdriver only different, called a nut driver. Rocket Boy was able to tell me exactly where in our disastrously messy garage I could find a nut driver, and it worked quite well. I am almost out of hose clamps, though, so when I break the next branch I'll have to make a hardware trip to get more hose clamps.

You're probably thinking, why doesn't she just get a new tree? And I should, I should. If Rocket Boy leaves this mortal sphere before I do, I will be running right down to McGuckin's or Target to buy a new tree. But as long as he's part of this family, I feel as though getting a new tree should be a mutual decision. At least that's what I think today.

Anyway. The next step was the lights. I really dragged my feet on that, somehow anticipating the disaster that lay ahead of me. Rocket Boy tried to help over the phone. "There are five good strings of lights in the gray tub," he told me. "And be sure to use the green extension cord." I found the green extension cord with no trouble and noted that it had several different places to plug in lights. It also looked to be in good condition, unlike many of our extension cords. But then Kid B and I looked for the five good strings of lights. After much searching through the gray tub, we found the five strings RB must have meant. But we also found four other strings of lights, all carefully labeled "Not working," and the date on which they were found not to be working.

"Why," I said to Kid B, "are we storing four large strings of lights that are NOT WORKING?" Because you know if Rocket Boy has labeled something as not working, they're not working. He doesn't give up on things easily, certainly not electrical things.

We soon found that one of the strings he claimed did work was not working either. But four strings seemed to work (three incandescent, one LED), so we put them on the tree. This took us only about halfway up the tree, so obviously we were going to need to buy more lights. The strings that were on the tree also looked horrible, because they weren't the kind that plug into each other. They all had to be plugged into the green extension cord. I did not understand that the green extension cord was supposed to be wound around the tree trunk so that its various outlets are distributed up and down the trunk. Instead I just left it down at the bottom of the tree, and so all the light strings also hung down to the bottom of the tree and got tangled up and looked ghastly. And then one of the strings of incandescents went out.

So I called Rocket Boy and yelled at him about all the problems with the lights. He apologized for not having told me various things. He also told me a long story about how he'd been babying our incandescent lights along for decades, and how badly designed they were, and how LED lights are actually better. "OK," I said. "I'm going to go buy four strings of LED lights. Goodbye." But first I took all the lights off the tree, since we were obviously going to be starting over, and in the process, all the incandescent lights stopped working.

I went to the little hardware store near us and discovered that one string of 100 LED lights would cost $21. Ah, that must be why we hadn't replaced all our incandescents sooner. So I bought just two strings and took them home. Then I studied the green extension cord and tried winding it around the trunk of the tree. That made SOOO much more sense. I put on our old LED lights and the two new strings... and the tree was only about two-thirds covered. Should I go back to the hardware store for more $21 lights? I finally decided to try again to make the incandescents work, and I got two of them going again. I put them on the top third of the tree. It looks a little ugly, with the cords showing, but the tree is lit. And I only broke one more branch while I was putting the lights on, fixed it with a hose clamp, and will go buy more hose clamps tomorrow or the next day.

So now we have a lighted tree. And I am a basket case. We'll try to put the ornaments, or some of them, on tomorrow. First I plan to get a very good night's sleep.