Christmas lights and other nuisances

Yesterday I finally caught a break from the rain (it's not a myth, it rains 9 months a year in the Seattle area!) and managed to install the Christmas lights in our house. I'd like to thank whoever created this tradition of stapling wired lights outside your house during the winter. My frozen hands would like to thank your ass for that.

Anyway, after going through the motions and spending half an hour on top of the roof wondering if I would be increasing the statistics of males who get hurt performing this annual obligation, I declared my part was done and was prepared to connect the electricity. There would be no problems like in Christmases past because my experience made me test all segments of the icicle lights beforehand and throw away the defective ones. So I called my daughter and my wife and connected the lights.


Not one but three segments were defective and had parts on it where the bulbs didn't light up! How can this happen? Why did these lights fail when they were tested and worked perfectly just 15 minutes before? Why is a man supposed to risk his neck going up the roof twice to perform one job? And why do they send us spare bulbs if it's nearly impossible to remove the defective one without breaking the socket? And why, after you successfully replaced a defective bulb, the part that wasn't lighting on still doesn't light on?

I was so pissed off I started yelling in the middle of the afternoon. "Fuck these Chinese people and their fucked up products!". This wasn't cool for two reasons. First, I don't know if the lights were made in China (it was probably Malaysia or Vietnam, but who can tell the difference between gooks?) and second, there are lots of Chinese people in our neighborhood. But, being Asian myself, I say stuff like that without fear of physical repercussions. Plus, if things get hot, I can just go ahead and pretend I'm Chinese. People may find it hard to believe due to the obvious differences between Chinese and Korean (Koreans are way better looking), but I only have to practice my morning "Ni-hao" and that will be alright.

Anyway, at that point I was so pissed with the Chinese (hey, at least they're not Filipino, right?) that I decided we needed Japanese food. I always thought the Japanese to be the mildest of the Asians and maybe their flavorless food would help calm down my anti-Asian disposition. Those chinks delivered. The food was fantastic, although one of the courses wasn't all that Japanese.


I was feeling much better after dinner when my wife informed me it was time for our one year old tradition of building the gingerbread house. She had gotten one of those kits from Toys 'r' Us and we were ready to replicate the picture in the box!


Needless to say, the house didn't turn out like the one above. The icing provided in the kit is too hard so it's difficult to spread, making decorating the house like the picture virtually impossible. At the end of it, my daughter looked like a snowman, so much icing she had over herself and if I could absorb sugar through the skin I'd have gained 5 pounds.

Looking back, it was a fun day altogether and, jokes with my fellow Asians aside, we learned some valuable lessons. First, don't ever use icicle lights to decorate your house. Those things have a failure rate that's too high no matter where they were produced. Second, make your own icing when decorating the gingerbread house. Third, any time spent doing Christmas'y things with your family is fun.

And, to end this on an even more Christmas'y note, my daughter created a new song while we were working on the gingerbread house, sung to the rhythm and melody of "Jingle Bells": Gingerbread, gingerbread, ginger all the way! O what fun it is to build a gingerbread today, hey!

Creative, isn't she?

She got it from her daddy.