A $3,000 trash tree

'Tis the season for irrational choices

I'm currently writing, folded criss-cross-applesauce, in the corner of a living room that looks like it was hit by an indoor tornado. This tornado seems to have been made mostly of plastic pine needles, tiny legos, and burned-out, incandescent, foot-stabbing Christmas lights. The entire room is essentially a trap from Home Alone.

And the whole family is sick. Again.

This unidentified illness has pummeled our family since Thanksgiving. The kids are home from school for the fourth day in a row. With any luck, they'll be healthy enough to return to class for a day or two before being sent home again until the middle of January.

I'm giving up. TV is their Mom now.

The decorations are not up. The cookies are not baked. The Christmas cards lay strewn across the kitchen counter as if rectangular totems of guilt, complete with my own face smiling back at me; I think she's mocking me. "The Final Countdown" by Europe reverberates through the back of my head when I'd much rather be hearing Bing Crosby.

Now is not the time to mess around - we're in holiday triage mode, and the wounded are becoming septic.

I should be brutally prioritizing. Yet, what is Christmas if not a time for irrational attachments? 'Tis the season driven by emotion and tradition, where memories and hopes for the future converge like waves crashing on the shore.

So, when we pulled out the trusty fake pre-lit Christmas tree, the one bought top-of-the-line from Costco long ago before LEDs were the norm, and it decided there wasn't another year of twinkling left in its little lights - I couldn't yeet it into the dumpster. This tree has moved in my Mom's Uhauls from Colorado to Arizona and back again - it is the only tree my kids, now four and six, have ever known at Christmas, and it was the last one we shared with my Dad and sister-in-law before they died.

I checked each little bulb in the hopes of jiggling those keystone loose offenders, taking out the rest of their respective strands - that's when I noticed the blackened interiors of the bulbs on entire branches. Whole sections all over the tree were blown entirely. There was no hope for the incandescents.

Did I do a rational analysis and calculate the time and money it would take to strip a pre-lit tree of lights completely, go to the store to buy all new bulbs, and then relight said tree? Not really. Would that have been exponentially more expensive than just hitting the "buy" button on my Costco app? Probably.

Instead, driven by wine-induced discussions with my friends, who own a recycling company, about the pitfalls of an overly disposable American attitude and an unhealthy attachment to objects that signify those parts of my life that are slipping away, I started the onerous process of unwinding approximately 7,396 dead bulbs off the plastic tree.

To his credit, my husband, who typically looks at expensive and inefficient projects with disdain, came in from the garage with industrial-strength wire cutters. I guess if he has to deal with my irrational projects, he at least tries to mitigate the damage.

The skill with which that tree was strung made me wonder if there is a secret guild of basketweavers working in the annals of a remote Kirkland Signature warehouse, creating their own festive Gordian Knot. Had I known what we were getting into at the start, that tree might have ended its life in the dumpster after all.

But once we started, there was no way out.

Two-and-a-half full days of snipping, getting stabbed, and cussing under our breaths later, the tree was finally bare. I then made the first of what has been four trips to buy lights so far. Channeling Clark Griswald, I will make this damn tree blind anyone in a two-mile radius.

Ever the economist, I started calculating my husband's and my hourly consulting rates, the hundreds of dollars on replacement lights so far, the time shopping for said lights, and the opportunity cost of those many projects still undone. This tree is . . . very expensive.

But, 'tis the season for a bit of irrationality. Next year, we will pull this giant tree out of the bag, and I'll think of the hours spent keeping it going - a strange labor of love in service to a memory. Hopefully, when I plug it in, it will light up on the first try.