The joy of a pre-lit tree

We tried for a few years to be a real Christmas tree family. You know, the kind with needles that actually fall off the tree and the scent of pine filling the room and sap stuck to your hands once you've finished standing it up.

We tried. We gave up.

I think our foray into real fir lasted for 2 years. Maybe 3.

We finally decided we just liked the convenience of a fake tree. We like not watering it. We like that our room is not littered with pine for the month of December. We, for whatever reason (and I'm sure that many of you will discern some deep emotional scar or inherent weakness in us that manifests itself in our distaste for a recently axed conifer) just like the fake one.

So we'd pull it out of the box every year on the day after thanksgiving, and poke all the color coded wire branches into the appropriate holes, string the lights, hang the ornaments, light a pine scented candle to complete the faux effect and call it Christmas.

Until about 4 years ago when we had the brilliant, revelatory thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to have a tree with the lights already on it?" What a great idea! So that year, we watched the sale flyers and purchased our very own imitation 7 foot 5 inch douglas fir complete with 700 white lights. And it came in three sections! Simply pull the three sections out, stack them on top of each other, watch the branches flop down, plug in those already attached white lights and bask in the glorious glow of an easy Christmas tree!

It was truly a beautiful thing.

Beautiful, that is, until this year.

Because as we plugged in those strands of 700 lights, only about 100 0f them actually lit up. And that's a problem, because it turns out that when this delightfully festive imitation douglas fir is assembled in China, those little Asian hands that put it together do a marvelous job of attaching those lights to the branches of that douglas fir. And, if, by chance they don't work and you have to remove them...well, let's just say that the time you would spend removing those lights is probably greater than the combined amount of time you would have spent hanging and removing strands of lights from an unlit tree for the past 4 Christmas seasons.

No, not probably. It is greater. We know. We've now lived through it.

Evidently, when they put the lights on these trees, they want to make sure they NEVER come off, or that it takes some sort of apocolyptic event for them to be released. I assume the logic is that the buyer will become so frustrated, they will simply give up and go purchase another pre-lit tree to replace it. (I think all of them are secretly made by the same Asian conglomerate, so it doesn't matter which brand we buy, they same people get the money. And no, I don't think I sound like a conspiracy theorist. I'm not paranoid. Everyone's just out to get me.)

So some two and half hours later, all five Smith's gingerly rubbing their fingertips which have by now lost any recognizable fingerprints, the old lights were removed and the new lights, purchased on sale at the Walgreens down the road on Black Friday (2 for the price of one!), had bedecked the now newly revitalized imitation Douglas Fir.

And the evil Asian conglomerate didn't get any of our money.

Well, they only got the few dollars we spent on new lights. All the Christmas paraphenalia is pretty much produced by that same Oriental monopoly.