KEY POINTS:
Christmas was a laidback, low-key affair at my house this year. That's fine with me, but pity it wasn't as luminous as it usually is.
That's because the two sets of Christmas lights we decorated our tree with both managed to fail. They were bought at The Warehouse
in the run up to last Christmas and while, from memory, they were pretty cheap, we had expected to get more than one Christmas out of them. We had after all stored them carefully over the intervening year.
But the lights going out was just the beginning of the Christmas lights nightmare. Getting the dead set off the tree and untangled from the still lit set proved to be the most frustrating thing I've attempted in 2007. As you may have discovered, Christmas tree lights often come as one infinite loop of wire and lights with a plug completing the circle at one end. The idea is that you use each side of the loop to decorate each side of the tree. It's supposed to be simple. But the clever design goes out the window when you attempt to add TWO sets of infinite loops to the same tree. This is the sort of tangle you don't want to get into on Christmas Eve when half of our Christmas lights went out.
We removed all the decorations from the tree and attempted to unwrap the dead and live infinite loops from each other. The result was a big ball of wire and lights on the lounge floor. We sat down and started to unravel them, something akin to threading a thousand needles. About 45 minutes later, the Christmas cheer had drained from this seasonal ritual.
"Screw it," I exclaimed and went off to find a pair of wire cutters. I then clipped through the dud lights to free the set that worked, narrowly managing not to clip the other set of wires as well. Finally we'd separated the two sets and could begin the arduous task of redecorating the 1.8 metre tree. We bought a new set of lights at Briscoes to replace the dead Warehouse set and by late afternoon, the lights were blinking again. By nightfall, the second infinite loop had died. So instead of the 200 lights we'd originally decorated the tree with, we have 48.
All of this has led me to one conclusion - fibre optic Christmas trees are the way to go. These trees are covered in thousands of needle-like slivers of fibre optic (the same stuff that carries internet traffic to us over the Southern Cross Cable). They're very easy therefore to light up and the effect can be quite remarkable. There are no ugly bulbs weighing down branches, no horrible wires snaking all over the place.
And these types of trees come in big sizes. This 2.1 metre metre version sold on Trade Me last month.
Smaller versions and even mock winter villages lit with fibre optics are available herehere. So next time I'm definitely opting for a fibre optic Christmas tree. Never again will I be caught in the infinite loop of Christmas lights.