My friend Sissy is a resourceful woman. Aside from being an accountant, this is a person who cooks right up there with Martha Stewart, hauls in her own Christmas tree, paints her own kitchen, and is an avid gardener. She’s also someone who was onto something way before the rest of us were.

Last Christmas, she called and said, “I think it’s China.” She said this with a tone similar to how a doctor might sound delivering bad news to a patient.

“What do you mean, ‘It’s China’?” I asked Sissy. She proceeded to tell me about her Christmas lights, or rather, what’s commonly referred to now as the Chinese Conspiracy.

It goes something like this: The year before, she’d purchased 18 strands (100 lights on each strand) of green Christmas lights and eight strands of red. Lights that were all, she happened to read, “Made in China.” She went about wrapping the trunk of her magnolia tree with the green lights, using the red ones on some of the branches. Pleased with the outcome of her labor, she set the timer and headed off to bed. The next night, however, things didn’t look so bright.

Gazing out from her living room window, she saw that the first three rows of green lights worked, but the strands in the middle did not. She returned to the store to find that they were all out of green ones. “They had blue, white and red,” she reported, “all ‘Made in China.’ ”

She decided to go with the white ones, went home and immediately got to work. “So now I’m lookin’ at green, white and red,” she said, “and thinkin’ it’s OK, not bad.”

Two nights later, however, the white lights went out, requiring a return trip to the store to buy yet more. Just as she was finishing wrapping the newest sets of lights, another outage occurred on her Christmas magnolia. It was during this max point of frustration that a working light went off in Sissy’s head. It’s all about China, she concluded.

By the time I was sitting in Sissy’s kitchen a few weeks later, it was indeed ALL about China!

“I mean this (Christmas lights) isn’t a complicated invention!” she told me. “It’s like they’re sabotaging Christmas! Like there’s some device in there that says ‘let’s wait until they get everything up, and THEN go out.’ Then you gotta go back out and buy more lights — Made In China!”

Sissy continued, convinced of the conspiracy.

“I understand now there’s a gun you can plug into the lights and it shoots a charge through there,” she said. “But isn’t it easier to buy new ones?” Her point, exactly.

The Chinese conspiracy theory now moved from Christmas to cribs.

“I mean, last week,” she said, “I went to the baby department at Nordstrom to buy a baby shower gift and even the baby clothes were Made In China! Now if you’re of a suspicious mind, I ask you, would you rather have flame retardant pajamas made in the USA or made in China?!”

At this point, I was rolling. I glanced outside at the poor magnolia tree, which I could’ve sworn had fewer lights than seconds before, and laughed even harder. “Surely somewhere in Houston,” I told her, “I can find a strand of green lights.”

“Well,” Sissy vowed, “next year I’m gonna look for Christmas lights that are NOT made in China.”

Immediately after that Christmas (as a joke) my friend Scott found some green lights. He handed me the box, wearing a big ole grin on his face. “These are for Sissy,” he smirked, “read on the bottom.” Sure enough, “Made In China.”

Even though it was after Christmas and they were made in China, Sissy was delighted by the box of green lights.

How, might you ask, is the Chinese Christmas conspiracy going this year? Well, here’s what I recently received in an e-mail:

“If you talk to Scott,” Sissy wrote, “please let him know that the string of green lights he sent me last year were the only ones that all worked. I decided not to get upset and blew off the idea of trying to buy more Chinese green lights. So, I just started wrapping the magnolia tree first with green lights, then white, then did the branches in red. Looked really good when I finished around midnight . . . plugged them in the next night and only two white balls went on!

"The wise Chinese did it to me again.”