Christmas and the Mini-Light Phenomenon

I love Christmas! I finally finished getting what Christmas decorations I could up. Don't you just love mini-lights? It seems every year I pack away those little buggers as neatly as I can. Then at some time through the year some gremlin goes into the box, tangles them up, and ensures many of the strings won't work when you plug them in.

This year I threw away about 20 strings of lights. I am so tired of trying to go through them light by light to see if I can get them to work. It all began with the wreath I mentioned last post...

As you can see, it looked really shabby. The ribbon was faded, ornaments had fallen off or broke, and, of course, the mini-lights didn't work when I plugged it in. So, I stripped it and replaced everything.





Then we started working on the house. Every year we do pretty much the same thing. This year there's a lot less. I bought some new lights to make it look complete, but this is not near what we're used to.





When it came to the tree star, I had another incident with mini-lights. Actually, it all started a few years ago. We had this beautiful golden filigree star. We loved how this star looked and how it made our tree complete. Well, the little mini-lights quit working. We ended up replacing our beautiful star with this one.

We kept the golden star hoping one day we would be able to fix it or find a set of lights for it. Time went by and the golden star was forgotten. The other day I was helping my husband in the garage. He needed a tool so I rummaged through the tool box and found the golden star stored neatly in a zip-lock.

I had a brainstorm. Why not take the lights from the Christmas red mini-light star and put them in here? Brilliance!

I went into the house and pulled the working star down. I carefully disassembled the star and pulled the lights out. Then with utmost care, I reassembled the golden filigree star...

It didn't work! Thinking it had to be the outlet, I tried a different one. Nothing. I pulled out the fuses and put new ones in. It flashed and went out again. I thought one of the mini-lights had to be bad. Nope.

I worked on this for at least an hour. I changed the fuses and lights until, miraculously, it worked save one little mini-light. I got a new light to replace it. I pulled out the dead light and gently plugged in the new one.

I thought, "this is it! We are finally going to have our beautiful golden star back!"

It didn't work. I gave up.

Now we have two stars stored in the zip-lock.

I hate mini-lights.