Christmas decorating

Last year while tirelessly winding the lights onto the tree, I decided that I wanted to buy a new tree that would stay pre-lit so I wouldn't have to put the lights on every year (its the worst part of decorating). Greg said that when we bought a house we could then get a new pre-lit tree. Well, we bought our house in April, so this Thanksgiving weekend we were on the hunt for the perfect pre-lit tree. One of the criteria was that the lights be LEDs, so we could save tons of energy. Well, come to find out, most places don't have pre-lit LED trees, and if they do, they are really expensive. So we decided that we would buy a plain tree and pre-light it ourselves with LEDs. The best price we found for LEDs was about $8 for a strand with 60 lights. So looking at how many lights were on the other pre-lit trees we estimated that we needed about 7 strands to light our tree.

Well we got home and started wrapping the lights on, and we figured out that in order to be able to fold the tree back up and keep the lights on we needed to string the lights up and down every branch. We only made it half way up the tree with our 7 strands. Off we went to buy 7 more, and of course the store we bought the first set at didn't have anymore so we had to drive to the farther store to find them. We get back home, its now pretty late, and MJ is hungry, cranky and sleepy, so off to bed she goes. Meanwhile, Greg is diligently string the rest of the lights on the tree and he gets to the end, and we need ONE more strand. We didn't get the final strand until the next day, but after 15 total strands, 900 lights total, (keep in mind that LEDs only take about 4.6 watts per strand, so you can string together 43 strands and not overload the circuit), we have a super bright, sparkly, pre-lit LED Christmas tree. Note the beam of light projected onto the ceiling. The picture doesn't quite do it justice and when we crack the curtains, a beam of light spills out of the front of the house. It's awesome!