Alan Gets Lit

Thanksgiving is over and December is here. Once again I am required to help Mark decorate the house for Christmas. Other than stringing a few lights across the windows and sticking wreaths on the front of the house, I don't want to. It is extra work on top of all the other things I have to get done around here. One job I dread is putting up the big Christmas tree in the living room. Mark has one long string of lights that he wraps around the tree. It is about a hundred feet long on a reel, with hundreds of little lights on it. My job is to hold that heavy reel of lights above the tree with one hand, then feed the lights to Mark while passing them around the back of the tree where Mark cannot reach. And Mark is very exacting in how and where each light is placed. So about two minutes into this ritual my arm starts to go numb. Five minutes in, and my arm is like a fifty pound weight attached to my shoulder. By the time Mark tells me that we're done, my shoulder and arm need help. I ache for days afterwards and no amount of pain killer helps. So imagine how happy I was when Mark told me to go to the store and pick up a new tree with lights already on it. It's called a pre-lit tree. Kind of like me at nine in the evening, pre-lit. For some reason, in my mind, I pictured a tree you pull out of the box, it flops open, you plug it into the wall socket, and ta-da! A fully lit Christmas Tree. Instead of such a well thought out thing, I got a tree that came in four pieces with wires running every which way through the branches. There was a big warning on the instructions, "DO NOT PINCH THE WIRES IN THE HINGES". That worried me. The 'easy to assemble' tree was kind of a pain in the ass to assemble. The sections did not fit easily, and I had to lube them up so that they'd slip in together. The branches were difficult to fold down, and there were numerous wires hidden within those branches that had to be plugged into other wires. Much cursing ensued. However, when it was all over my arm didn't hurt, my shoulder didn't ache and it actually looked okay. God bless the Chinese.