The Holiday Mall Decorator
A commercial holiday decorator was tasked with assembling a massive thirty-foot artificial Christmas tree in the center atrium of a busy suburban shopping mall on the night before Thanksgiving. Working entirely alone until four in the morning, he meticulously attached hundreds of heavy green branches, strung thousands of tangled fairy lights, and hung giant glass ornaments using a high-powered cherry-picker crane. Just as he placed the glowing star on the very top branch and signaled his assistant on the ground to plug in the main power cable, the entire tree short-circuited, burst into a massive shower of blue sparks, and completely melted the top half of the structure into a smoking pile of plastic. The exhausted decorator stared at the ruined tree, took off his hardhat, and said to the mall manager, "Well, the good news is we don't have to worry about watering it."
The Tangled Fairy Light Marathon
A homeowner decided to decorate his front porch for the suburban holiday lights competition and retrieved four large plastic tubs of Christmas lights from the attic. Upon opening the first tub, he discovered that thirty different light strands had fused together into a tight, impenetrable ball of wire and glass that looked like a giant glowing bird's nest. He spent six continuous hours sitting on his cold driveway, untangling wires, replacing burnt-out fuses, and testing tiny bulbs with a voltage tester while his neighbors watched from across the street. When his wife came outside to hand him a hot mug of cider and asked how the progress was going, he held up the single untangled strand he had managed to free and said, "If I finish this by Easter, we're just going to call them spring festival lights."
The Oversized Living Room Pine
A father took his kids to a tree farm and bought what looked like a perfectly sized balsam fir in the wide-open field. However, when they hauled the tree into their suburban living room, they realized it was sixteen feet tall and six feet wider than their ceiling allowed. Refusing to admit he made a bad calculation, the father brought out a hand saw, cut two feet off the trunk, chopped off the top branch, and wedged the massive tree into the corner, causing the branches to completely block the hallway door and push the television against the wall. His wife walked into the room, squeezed sideways through the branches to reach the kitchen, and said, "It's very festive, dear, but if we want to leave the house this week, we're going to have to crawl out the bathroom window."