Further Adventures in Christmas Tree-Lighting

“The Dark Side of Holiday Lights” (Dec. 12) relates uncannily to an e-mail letter I wrote three days ago to my aunt. I had thought of sending this to you even before reading your article and now I can’t resist:

Dear Aunt Sally,

Dad and I are both perfectionists--two perfectionists is one too many in any situation. He will have one theory about how the tree should be strung. I will have another. Usually it starts with that cursed problem of untangling the lights left in a heap from last year. Who put them away like that???

Then we argue about which strings we should use, since there are always about 15 sets in the box, some of which your mother must have been using circa 1950. Then we plug these in and they blow a fuse. Once we have determined which lights are the newest, Dad has to remind me how much easier it was last year when I wasn’t there and he simply went down to CVS and picked up a little plastic tree and strung it with one strand and, voila, Christmas.

I smile inwardly that we actually both love a big fresh pine tree in the front room. Now somewhere around the beginning of this decade, Dad and Bill started a movement to rid Christmas of colored lights. At first I balked because I always loved the soft look of the tree emanating green and red and blue tints. Each year after my move out West, I would come home to find that Dad had bought yet another million yards of white lights and the older colored ones were short-circuiting.

We had one final year of “compromise” with three white light sets and one colored set, followed by a total return to pre-civil rights segregation, arboreally speaking.

The next tree-trimming controversy comes when we plug in a set of (white) lights and begin to drape it every which way over the tree. A question that should have been included in that bestseller “Conversations With God” or whatever it’s called: Should one string the lights around the tree in a spiral from top to bottom or should each set start at the top and come straight down from different sides like a maypole? (The object of the game is, of course, to make the tree look like it naturally gave birth to little lights.)

Next we turn off all the house lights and observe the dark gaps in the tree. Usually, if I’m present, there are no gaps--there are, instead, too many darned lights. Dad says, “I told you we didn’t need so many sets!” I say, meekly, “I think it looks OK.”

ANDREA LEE DAVIS

Via e-mail