Our 3-year-old Christmas tree was first set up some time early November, but after the ornaments and lights had been up, I realised that the lights were not working! That made my work of spiralling the lights on the tree a complete waste and I had to take all of them down. Lesson learnt: I should have made sure the lights were working before putting them up.

At that point, I had to decide between getting a new sets of lights or trying to repair it. My father-in-law pointed out that one or more bulbs had a connection issue, causing the entire circuitry to be ‘opened’, and the only way to fix it is to locate the problematic bulb(s) and replace them.

Since we were unable to light up any of the bulbs,  I could only check the connection by examing each of the 140 bulbs individually. That’s gonna be hard work!

Choosing the lazier alternative, I proceed to search for another new set of lights. Checking out the ongoing bazaar by Metro at Causeway Point, we bought a set of lights which came equipped with music. Darius would love the music, I thought.

We had wanted to buy a set of multi coloured lights but the only ones available were red and natural colours. Thinking that red would look very weird on our tree, we bought the latter.

After testing out the lights at the bazaar and home to ensure they were working, I proceeded to spiral the lights on our Christmas tree. Turning it on, the lights shone beautifully with the music chiming in the background.

We then showed Darius the tree and he seemed to like it as much. However, we realised he would turn his eyes from the lights after a short while, seemingly that the lights were too strong or confusing for him. We believed it was the rapid blinking of the lights that made looking at the lighted tree a tiring task.

Our Christmas Tree initially in early November

Darius looks attentatively at the tree, but it's bad for his eyes

The result — we left the lights turned off most of the time as the blinking lights were distracting and too strong for our eyes. This, however, had defeated our original purpose of decorating the tree with lights. In comparison, our previous lights were less glaring as the brightness is often moderated. That is, its bulbs did not light up to their maximum brightness immediately. Instead, they would start from being dim before gradually brightening up, thus lessening the strain on our eyes.

After lazing around for a few weeks, I finally took the effort to attempt repairing the old lights by plucking out one bulb at the time and checking the connection of each bulb. I managed to find quite a few disconnected bulbs and replaced some of them with the spare bulbs from the new set of lights, since all the spare bulbs from the original set had been used up.

After an hour of tedious work, the lights were finally working again! It was a satisfying sensation when the bulbs suddenly lighted up. Unfortunately, about 30% of the bulbs were still not working (though they did not affect the connection), probably due to burnt tungsten in the bulbs. Despite so, we decided to use the lights on our tree.

And so I took down the newly bought lights and replaced them with this repaired set. Not wanting to waste the new set of lights, I stacked several boxes at the bottom of the tree (two of the boxes were from my gaming guitar sets) and decorated them with the new lights.

So after all these, our Christmas tree is finally up and running, and I’m satisfied with the outcome:

Glad it turned out pretty well

Christmas will be arriving in three weeks’ time. Looking forward to it but would be reminded of how time had flew by this year again.

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