The Christmas Tree

To begin with, you men can just skip this one unless you have a decidedly nonmasculine interest in the erection and decoration of Christmas trees. Or unless you have a sadistic inclination to find joy in the misfortune of others.

Those of you who have known my Christmas trees of the past know that I have roughly 1,000 ornaments and that, in the best of times, putting my tree together for the holidays involves between 8 and 10 hours of hard work. This year was not the best of times.

Edwin's daughter, Denise, and Dalys's two children, Daisy and Roberto, had communicated an interest in helping with the tree trimming this year, so we set Tuesday, December 8th, for the date. That gave me three days from the culmination of my Spanish classes to get the tree up and string the lights, allowing time for a birthday dinner out on Friday night, the Florida/Alabama game on Saturday afternoon, and a leisurely pace getting ready. It's Larry job to put the tree together and retrieve all the boxes from storage, but he had a golf outing on Saturday morning and was too consumed with the game that afternoon to do more than unload the tree from the box. He put it together Sunday morning, however, and left me to unfurl and fluff out the branches while he alternately watched football on t.v. and punished the lawn practicing his golf swing. After a couple of hours unfurling and fluffing, I set about unwinding the lights and then winding them around the tree. I grew tired after a while and put off the completion of the task until Monday. For once I had allowed myself plenty of time, and my back was aching from all the reaching up and bending down. The golf course is closed on Monday, so I could count on Larry's help with the highest spots.

Monday dawned bright and clear and, after making some preliminary moves toward the preparation of lunch for myself, Larry, and Edwin, I tackled the lights with renewed enthusiasm. Just as I got past the midpoint, however, I realized that I wasn't going to have enough of the little buggers. There were plenty last year, but I had done some branch winding (as all the professional tree trimmers advise) and had overshot my supply of twelve strings. So I dashed downtown with an hour to spare before having to get serious about lunch only to discover that there were no clear, non-blinking lights to be had in the town of Boquete. Distressed, I returned home, completed and ate lunch, and announced that a trip to David that afternoon was unavoidable. Larry deemed such a trip to be foolhardy, so he called Doc/Charly/Ramon to find out if they had any clear, unblinking Christmas tree lights to spare. They offered three strings, only one of which worked. And one of my remaining three strings didn't work.

So it was off for a whirlwind trip to David, which, I found when I arrived, was approximately 110 degrees. Arrocha, the big housewares store where we had purchased lights last year, had the entire back wall filled with shelves of Christmas tree lights, but not one strand of clear lights. I hadn't anticipated this possibility; Panamanians' love of color tends toward the garish, so I figured clear lights would be the last to go. A trip to three other stores in the same shopping complex was similarly fruitless: plenty of colored lights, musical lights, icicle lights, but no small, clear lights. Sweating from every pore in my body, I drove across town, through David's hellish traffic, to a big grocery/hardware/everything store which at first appeared to have NO Christmas items. As I was leaving, however, I stumbled across an aisle with Christmas paraphernalia. (Marketing, like customer service, is not the Panamanian businessman's strong suit. This particular store chain, which carries most everything but in a very hodgepodge way, is owned by the current President of Panama, which gives me pause.) After a lengthy shuffling through of items in complete disarray, I came away with six boxes of clear, unblinking lights. I made my way home on the pot-holed two-laned highway filled with activities of all sorts, showered, and set about finishing up the stringing of the lights before the arrival of the kids the next morning.

There were some moments of anxiety when two-thirds of the tree went dark shortly after completion. Larry came to the rescue, eventually located a bad connection, and set everything right. The morning with the kids is a whole nother story (Daisy dropped and broke the first two ornaments she touched and then got bored; Denise did a fine job except for hiding the best ornaments behind other ornaments or tree limbs; and Roberto, who was attracted to the very small ornaments, placed every one of them within an inch of each other on about one one-hundredth of the tree.) In any event, we were moving right along until, about an hour into the chore, most of the lights went out again. I did my best to find the source of the problem but, with three children underfoot and lots of ornaments already on the tree, it was a hopeless task. The children would have been crushed if I had called the whole thing off, so we continued to decorate; all the while I had the sinking feeling that I probably was going to have to take the whole thing apart, sort out the light problem, and redecorate. I fed them lunch early and took them home as quickly as I could. Time elapsed: roughly 10 hours, not counting the trip to David.

Upon returning, I did, in fact, have to undecorate large parts of the tree, but I eventually found a very hot connection, unplugged it, and replugged a string into another outlet. Most of the lights were restored, but an area of about eight inches around the bottom of the tree was dark. Thus, another 45-minute drive to David, back to the store where I had finally found the clear lights, only to find that there were no more clear lights. Eventually, i.e., after about 30 minutes of shuffling through all the shelves, I found some other clear lights of the LED variety, considerably smaller than the ones already on the tree. Having no other option, however, I bought them and drove the 25 miles or so back to Boquete amid dense pre-holiday traffic, construction vehicles, livestock trucks, dogs and chickens in the road, etc., etc. The lights looked fine, and a complete nervous breakdown on my part narrowly avoided. I rehung ornaments and redistributed those hung by the kids. And the tree is finally up. I figure a total of 18 or more hours were devoted to the endeavor.

I'll write soon about a recent invasion of the house by army ants, as well as about the snake that greeted me inside the front door as I returned from shopping day before yesterday. I know you'll be relieved to hear about some real tropical adventure. But I assure you that neither the ants nor the snake, as alarming as they were, were as stressful as the Christmas tree.