Wait! So What's Going To Kill Us Now? For Christmas?

 The X-mas tree is up. It's a little 4-footer, a fake tree, and sits on a low table in front of the window facing the street. It comes with its own lights, two sets of them alternating. First it's all white, 

 

then red/gree/blue/gold ones flash before it goes back to white, and back and forth. It's really hard to get my camera set for it, but it's for the eyes, anyway. The lights reflect well in the plastic film storm windows, with all the wrinkles in the film bouncing the colors. When we want privacy, we shut the blinds. Inquisitive neighbors can see light changes in the cracks between the blinds.

You may note I haven't mentioned ornaments. We got rid of all our ornaments before we moved. Some went away a few years ago to family members who were raising young kids, presumably needing to spend more funds on diapers than tree ornaments. Coincidentally, we were downsizing. Win-win.

The one thing we didn't leave behind was our combined collection of old bubbler lights. Without a tree any more they had a few interesting holidays, like being taped across the front of a display cabinet one year, or on a rigged up platform another one. We still enjoyed the bubbling. 

One or two may have expired each year, either in storage or just burning out when plugged in. We'd check out replacements, find them some years, not others.Currently we have something between 2 strings and 4 of them, intact, lighting up, and still bubbling well. One or two glow but don't bubble or just bubble every couple minutes, and with their weird positioning in non-tree locations, a couple would tip over and we couldn't tell if they would still bubble or not. They were carefully packed along with the jingle bell wreath to go north with us, and unpacked this morning. Tomorrow they'll be rechecked and put on a tree again.

The wreath has a spot to hang facing the street between two doors so weather doesn't do any damage and it's still visible. Nobody will hear them, but they'll remain beautiful. Two windows over is the one the tree stands behind.

I spent a bit of time online looking for either more strings or loose bulbs. To my vast disappointment this year's version of "bubbling" is a bent over Santa, dropped drawers, farting bubbles... or something. Not exactly to our taste, but from the quantity of them for sale, they must have a lot of fans/customers. There were a very few strings of bubble lights for sale, all used. Many only claimed that 4 of the seven were still working, whether light or bubbling, and the owners were still asking ridiculously high prices for them, plus shipping. I managed to find two strings that were both intact and not exorbitantly priced. Figuring subsequent years would only get worse, I ordered them both.

Several hours later I checked in on my emails. One interesting one came through, but without a sufficient amount of information.  Supposedly I couldn't buy them and I was supposed to contact the seller. "Couldn't" was phrased more like "not allowed to". I knew it wasn't that my card didn't go thorough. It had. But which seller? The two strings of bubblers came from different sellers and the email didn't specify before the email vanished.

Maybe it was both?

I decided maybe Google knew what was going on. Turns out the old ones had methylene chloride inside them. It's a solvent, used for stripping paint, possibly carcinogenic, and toxic. It gave a very dependable bubbling effect when it heated utp. They do something different these days, and still sell them. 

All the predictable things ran through my head that people who grew up the same time I did had going through theirs each time another much used or often done terrible thing had their awfulness revealed for the world to fear. Remember mercury thermometers? We kids used to play with mercury, rolling balls of it across our school desks, dividing and reconnecting them just to watch it happen. Usually we did it in the pencil trough, because if they rolled off the desk they'd splat into dozens of tiny balls on the floor, a devil of a task to pick up! Somebody for sure would come up with a penny and challenge another person to rub the mercury across it until the penny changed to silver, with the claim that then it could be mistaken for a nickel when you were at the store. Boy oh boy, we worked hard trying to make that happen! It never did, so there wasn't any temptation to try to cheat a cashier somewhere. And look at us, we're all fine now. While one drop of mercury today in a school clears the building till the guys in the hazmat suits come scoop it up!

Hey, anybody got a penny for them...?

The logical result of those scares was and is that my generation tends to ignore all the latest revelations about what is terrible about things we'd do all the time without giving it a thought and apparently without coming to any harm. There are exceptions, of course. We'd pile all the kids we could fit in cars before seatbelts came along, Moms held babies in their arms, and if there were even more people they could be piled in the open back of a pickup. Now seatbelts and child car seats are universal. Smoking happens outdoors more than in the house with the kids. Bike helmets are common, and many sports use knee pads and other protections routinely. But not everything has changed.

So you tell one of us that something we've lived with forever could harm us, we look at each other, ask if we used them, find the answer is yes, decided we're still just fine thank you, and shrug it off and keep stringing the lights. Mind you, some bulbs often had dried out over the summer up in the attic or garage or wherever they'd been stored, and got tossed. Nothing left to make bubbles, so why keep them? Nobody remembered a chemical smell. Nobody found them oily. We just took precautions not to cut ourselves on broken glass, watched out for frayed wires like for all light strings, and whittled the strings of bubblers down to whatever was still working before hanging them on the tree.

Am I going to throw out our bubblers? Nope, unless they leak. Or look cracked. Old bulbs that no longer light or bubble will go bye-bye, but working ones will go gently on the tree. Just like in previous years. I'll give them an extra close look first of course. I'll keep in mind we might be looking at more than a possible fire hazard. We have more bulbs than strings to hold them, or maybe it's more strings than bulbs to fill them, but until it comes down to open spaces on the last string, they'll keep going up. These are one last piece of our holiday childhoods.  The grandchildren and great grandchildren can come over and wonder at what used to be on decorated trees back when these old people, somehow still living as ancient as we are, were sill children (as if that were ever possible!), that now are all but lost to history.

Unless of course somebody figures out how to make a non toxic LED version of lights that actually make bubbles one can watch for hours, something that can be tucked away and brought out again each winter for that ever-increasing stack of nostalgia that grows through the years. Each generation will try to share the wonder with the next growing generation, and then the next. Likely each will fear they've failed as the newest / shiniest / fanciest / most exquisite thing is under the wrapping and bows under the tree each year, and not on it where all can see. 

They just have to stop and look.