The Bible describes the punishment for adultery as burning at the stake. Long ago, people suspected of practicing witchcraft were stoned to death. According to Muslim law, men caught drinking alcohol are to be publicly flogged. In Dante’s Inferno, those guilty of flattery must live in a sea of excrement. I must have done something far worse, because I was sentenced to life with a Balsam Hill Pre-lit Christmas Tree.
For those of you who don’t know, Balsam Hill is a company based in Redwood City, California, and they manufacture artificial Christmas trees. Said trees are of such surpassing beauty and magnitude that any wife who stumbles upon advertisements will immediately become obsessed and convince her husband that yes, they should shell out a cool grand for a nine-foot-tall fake Christmas tree.
My Story
Such was my lot five years ago when I finished medical training and got my first “real” job. Finally making enough money to attack the mountain of student loans, we instead spent that income on a 274 cm tall structure of steel, green plastic, and 2500 tiny light bulbs woven throughout the branches. It was glorious. With the touch of a button on the remote control, you could have white-lights only (in case snotty, un-fun people are coming over) or beautiful colors (for everyone else.) Or you could give in to your inner Clark Griswold and turn on ALL the lights, putting out enough light to be visible from the International Space Station. The best part: Balsam Hill provides a guarantee that even if one, two, or more bulbs in a string burn out, the rest of the string of lights blazes on.
Ah, those were the salad years. The first year or two, the tree was amazing, requiring only occasional replacement of burned-out lights. The downside at this point, other than the interest on the unpaid student loans, was the physical labor required to dissemble the monstrosity into four sections, and store it in the basement.
But we were soon to discover the inevitable doom, the torture of biblical proportions. The lights proceeded to burn out at an exponential rate. Entire strings went dark, then entire sections. What does any red-blooded, holiday-loving husband and father do? He googles the shit out of it. That’s what I did. I googled, and googled, and watched YouTube videos, and read Reddits, and bought the Lightkeeper Pro, a completely f%$*ing useless chunk of plastic. I’ll get into that later.
The videos from the company, and other videos and posts regarding Christmas light repair all give the same basic steps.
1. Check the fuses in the plugs. There are approximately 50 of these plugs in this tree, woven between poky plastic branches and superbly camouflaged.
2. Check the master bulbs. These are weird-looking light bulbs positioned close to the trunk, and their purpose is mysterious and mystical. Possibly, they are some kind of extra fuse?
3. Replace burned-out bulbs.
4. Use the Lightkeeper Pro to either track the flow of electricity in the wires, or shove a socket into the tool, click the trigger, and magically fix the entire string. Doesn’t work. Not even close.
That’s it. That’s all they tell you to do. And I did. I have dug out plugs from the depths of artificial boughs hundreds of times, retrieving 5 mm fuses with the dexterity of a neurosurgeon. Never have they been burned out. Never. Because the circuit is protected by the complete failure of electricity to travel through the wires. Juice never makes it to the fuse to burn them out.
Same with master bulbs. I finally figured out how to pull them from their sockets using the Balsam Hill light bulb remover tool, and also remove a glowing master bulb, and plug the questionable master bulb into the socket that is known to work. When the questionable bulb lights up, we know it’s good. Then, you return all master bulbs to their respective sockets.
Replace all obvious burned-out bulbs. Take this year, 2021. When we put the tree together, maybe a thousand bulbs failed to light up. A thousand. So, what did we do? Did we test the bulbs with the LightSaver Pro? No, because the Balsam Hill bulbs are a proprietary shape, and don’t fit in the LightSaver Pro test gadget. Balsam Hill bulbs look like this:
Normal Christmas mini-lights look like this:
So, Balsam Hill lights cannot be tested with the LightSaver Pro. And… you cannot buy regular replacement bulbs to put in the Balsam Hill tree. More on that later.
The Solution
So, did we give up? Hell, no. I pulled out a working bulb and marked it with red sparkly tape from my daughter’s desk. This was my test station. Then I pulled out non-working bulbs, one at a time, and shoved them in my test socket. If they turned on, they were good and were returned to their original socket, and marked with a piece of masking tape, indicating that they had been tested.
If they did not light up, they were burned out, and were placed in a Ziploc sandwich bag, and replaced with a replacement bulb. Which we had about a hundred of, because we ordered them last year.
When we realized that there were hundreds of burned-out bulbs, we called Balsam Hill to order more. They are out of stock and will be available next September. NEXT SEPTEMBER.
At this point, my wife had the brilliant idea to buy replacement bulbs, which look like this:
We bought a pack of ten for two dollars. While we were at Home Depot, we also grabbed a string of fifty lights for $2.50, because I thought, if they work, I can just remove the actual bulb from the base, and put them in the Balsam Hill base.
And it worked. Forty hours later, we had a beautiful lighted tree. And bleeding fingers. So, now we get to the point of this story. What makes the strings of lights that aren’t supposed to burn out do exactly that? I possess the knowledge. It’s a bulb that is either shattered, or not seated perfectly. Because sometimes, a bulb is pushed in a micron too far, or a micron too short, and the whole f$%*ing thing turns off. That’s it. It’s almost never a fuse or master bulb.
You Can Do It
So, if you have one of these trees, and are in despair, don’t. You can totally fix this tree, if you are willing to put in thousands of dollars-worth of your own labor in order to save a thousand bucks on a replacement tree. My advice: Do the work with your wife and kids, or friends, with bourbon. That way you form some happy holiday memories. Or, just ignore the prelit bulbs and throw on a ten-dollar string of lights, which you can throw away when they fail. Come to think of it, that’s a way better idea. Forget about all that stuff I said earlier and just do that.