Adventure With Our Christmas Tree Lights

Our Christmas tree lights are the kind you buy for $2-3 at CVS, so naturally they are not top quality. I’m not even sure if you can buy high quality lights. Whatever be the case, the ones we have malfunctioned. Somewhere along that string of 100 lights, one was burned out, causing the whole house of cards to collapse.

We had options, of course. We could have gone through each light and found the problem bulb, but I’m not too good in these situations. I lack patience to a fault. The other alternative was to simply go out and buy new ones, which of course is the American way, throw out the old (or even simply “no longer new”) and buy something new. This applies to big ticket items like cars, as well.

We went over to Aubuchon and A&N picked out some lights that have a special feature that allows for the chain of lights to remain lit even if one of the bulbs comes loose or burns out. There’s something to the wiring the I’ll have to ask JH (or PR or RR) to explain to me, because I don’t understand how it works.

We ended up getting some more fluorescent bulbs, as well, since we are still in the midst of Fluorescent Bulb Mania.

On the way home, however, I couldn’t help but think that we could figure out the problem. Besides, we have a multi-meter, and locating the problem might even be a little fun, though the kids seemed to express serious reservations about the endeavor.

I was determined, however, and decided we weren’t going to open the new ones until we at least gave it a try. I even came up with a plan. The first step was to go along the chain and check for loose bulbs. If that didn’t work, then we would pull each bulb and use the multimeter to check it. Sure, it was tedious, but chances were good that the problem bulb occurred before 10^th bulb, so more than likely we wouldn’t have to check all 100.

As luck would have it, we discoverd the loose bulb with about 10 tries. Good fortune shined its light on us. For the other half of the lights, A has this theory that our glowing snowman somehow repairs the light chain. Of course I was skeptical, and of course, I was once again wrong. The moment she plugged in the snowman, the second half of the chain lit up.

Best of all, we fixed the problem. I was planning on returning the lights we’d just purchased, but after discussing it with everyone, we figured that a backup set of lights wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I love when things work out, especially when the kids are involved. There are all sorts of life lessons being taught there.

Until the next time, thanks for reading.