Christmas in Bakersfield

737 Words.

THE BLUE LIGHTS
By Sticktalker

          When I was in elementary school the Christmas Holiday tradition on my mother’s side was for one of the aunts and uncles who lived in Southern California to host the Christmas family dinner, get-together and gift exchange. Everyone came for the afternoon for visiting, cooking, eating and the gift exchange. This party rotated so everyone had a chance to host.
          Most of the family lived in Los Angeles County, so travel wasn’t a problem, but one year it was Aunt Esther and Uncle Bill’s turn to host, and they lived in Bakersfield which was a LONG way off and required a lot of planning to attend.
          Aunt Esther lived so far away that every summer gramma and I would take the train from Los Angeles to Bakersfield for a visit. A week later my parents would drive up spend a day or two there and bring us home.
          This story isn’t about THAT trip though, it’s about the family Christmas we spent in Bakersfield.
          First, you need to know, Bakersfield is HOT, and is home to a number of oil refineries (where Uncle Bill worked) and grows a LOT of cotton. Cotton requires heat to grow. Did I mention Bakersfield is hot? Oh, yeah, I did already. Well, anyway, Bakersfield IS hot. It’s hot in December, too. I know you folks who live in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin don’t believe that, but trust me, it’s hot year round.
         This story is about the year Aunt Esther (who had no children of her own) decorated her Christmas tree with nothing but BLUE balls and lights.
         The grownups thought it was a bit strange, but us kids thought it was great! I think we might have been tired of the old green trees with red, white, green and blue lights (the old-fashioned ones with BIG bulbs definitely NOT the new “LED” lights that are sprouting everywhere this year).
          My cousin Steve and I had to help Aunt Esther with the lights since we were the oldest of the grandkids except for Paul, but he was off to college in Washington State and not even there. First she’d take each strand of lights, lay it out on the table and plug it in. Usually it wouldn’t light up. That mean a bulb, maybe two, had burnt out. You had to replace each light bulb with a brand new one – one at a time. Unscrew the old bulb, screw in the new one, lights didn’t come on, move to the next bulb, repeat. Fun at first, but tiring about the middle of the first string. Sometimes you finished changing each single bulb and the strand STILL didn’t work. That meant you had TWO burned out bulbs.
         What you had to do then was start at the beginning and begin REPLACING each old bulb with a new one until the strand came on. That meant the last old one was bad. Now you had a box of “maybe good-maybe bad” bulbs. You had to take that strand you had just fixed, take out a good bulb and start replacing it with the “maybe good-maybe bad” bulbs until you found the second burned bulb. Whew!
          Finally we finished and helped Aunt Esther hang the lights. The rest of the nieces and nephews and the adults helped decorate the tree. When it was finished for some reason Steve took a metal sewing pin he had found and stuck it into the two wires on a strand. There was a flash of white light, a sharp “ZING” and the pin melted in his fingers. Steve screamed and tried to drop the pin but it was stuck to his fingers and HOT. Steve’s father, Uncle Lowell, said something about a “short”. I didn’t know what a “short” was, but it sure was hot enough to melt that pin and burn Steve!
         Oh yeah, all the lights on the tree went out…We started the process of finding the bad bulb. An hour later we discovered ALL the lights were burnt out. Aunt Esther had to put in the old fashioned different colored light bulbs to make the lights work. "Those things that hurt, instruct,” she said to Steve and I, then went on; “I think Benjamin Franklin said that.”
         For some reason she was kinda bad tempered for the rest of the gathering. Took me years to figure out why.
         You know, maybe LED lights aren’t such a bad idea after all. I don’t think they EVER burn out, do they?

(This contest was for the Paper Dolls Newbie Group Only. Here's the link to the contest page)
"PDG Alumni Short Story Contest"