In 2016, we decided to get a second Christmas tree for our lower level. Because I didn’t like putting on Christmas lights–every time I did, I put a corner of a mantel into my kidneys while winding or unwinding the Christmas lights, I thought we could get a pre-lit or pre-strung Christmas tree for our upstairs–and move the old tree downstairs.<\/p>\n
Well, that was very easy. In 2017, when we put up the new pre-strung tree and plugged it in. All we had to do was put the ornaments on. Previously, it had been a two or three day process: Put up the tree, fluff it, string the lights, and decorate it. But the new process was essentially two steps and something we could do willingly in a day.<\/p>\n
But that was then. 2018 was now. When we plugged in the tree, several sections of the tree were unlit. I spent an hour or so trying to identify the bulbs that burned out and knocked whole strands out, but ultimately I could not, and resigned myself to stringing additional lights in the dark zone before decorating it.<\/p>\n
Then, after we got the ornaments on it, another section went dark. And remained dark because I would have had to fuss with the lights through the ornaments or lay a new strand of lights over the ornaments.<\/p>\n
I was in the mood to pitch the thing (or donate it to a charity garage sale and let someone else fuss with it for a couple of dollars), but these lights were not embedded in the tree; they were strung on the tree. So if I took them off the tree, I would still have a tree for next year that I could string lights on. It seemed like a good, economical idea. Especially since I was not going to replace this tree with a prelit tree of any sort next year that I would essentially rent for a trouble- and hassle-free single Christmas.<\/p>\n
So after I packed up the Christmas decorations and ornaments yesterday, I started on the lights. It was then that I discovered that:<\/p>\n
The total time to remove 600 lights and their clips and zip ties: Four hours<\/b>.<\/p>\n
Which I guess isn’t too bad. 600 lights removed in 4 hours is 150 lights an hour, or 2.5 per minute. But the metrics ultimately don’t make me feel better.<\/p>\n
About the time I really, really came to regret the decision is same time I thought I was almost finished. The total elapsed time of really, really regretting my decision and thinking I was almost done itself was about two and a half hours. But once I get onto a task like that, I must finish no matter the cost in sanity or spending my entire day off messing with that tree.<\/p>\n
Worst of all, as I was working, I couldn’t help think that somewhere in China, some young woman has to put the lights on these Christmas trees, several a day, or she’ll be fired and have to return to the provinces to eke out a living on a substinence-level farm. The perspective didn’t help.<\/p>\n
You know, I read a lot of Buddhist Zen and mindfulness stuff, but I never really got into the zone of it while working on the Christmas tree because I was too busy resenting the task. Which was probably even unnecessary. Clearly, I was hanging too much onto my self and a preference to do something else with that time even if I didn’t know what that was.<\/p>\n
Worst of all, it kind of felt like a recap that replayed my 2018: A simple task, expanding to fill all the available time and leaving me having done something without actually feeling a sense of accomplishment for it. <\/p>\n
So next year, I will pull the our existing Christmas lights out of storage (not the ones from this tree, which I basically cut off and would never have figured how to get onto the tree again given their strange separations), I will test them before I put them on the tree, and the tree will be lit the old fashioned way: Over the course of days, and with many mantel pokes to my back which I will appreciate as I never have before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 2016, we decided to get a second Christmas tree for our lower level. Because I didn’t like putting on Christmas lights–every time I did, I put a corner of a mantel into my kidneys while winding or unwinding the Christmas lights, I thought we could get a pre-lit or pre-strung Christmas tree for our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24076"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24078,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24076\/revisions\/24078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}