Today I decided that I was going to get out a few Christmas decorations, even though the weather is extremely confused and it’s in the 60s.



I had some pre-decorating fuel:

Not sure where all of those went…


And began to blast my best decorating music.

Sounds about as fun as my kitchen playlist, no? Don’t worry, my friends at the early bird special and bingo like this music too.


I armed myself with a big lighter and a butcher knife to head down into the basement.

I detest spiders and bugs and am terrified of them.


I brought up one tree, and managed to stay bug-free. We actually have two trees. Let me fill you in:

The first year we were married, I threw a giant fit for 6 months since we lived in Mr. How Sweet’s bachelor pad. He never decorated for Christmas because he was a big grinch. I didn’t think that we would be decorating that year, nor did we really have any room to put a tree. So one day while I wasn’t home, Mr. How Sweet went in search of a Christmas tree. He found a gorgeous, large artificial tree on sale at a great price. He bought ornaments, wreaths and lights, intending to surprise me. Once he got home and tried to get the tree up, it was so big that it wouldn’t fit in the apartment! So he ran out to Macy’s and bought a pre-lit tree that would fit. He still decorated it in time for me to come home to a winter wonderland. Isn’t that sweet?


The other tree is huge, and since it was on clearance it couldn’t be returned. Since this tree was smaller, I knew I could manage to get it upstairs on my own. I brought it up and took it out, then proceeded to put it together.

Pre-lit trees are the bane of my existence. I come from a long line of psycho tree decorators. It takes my aunt a few days to decorate and my mom a few weeks. They put over 1000 lights on their trees as well as hundreds of ornaments. Yes, just like Clark Griswald. Countless times when I was younger, after my mom had hundreds of lights on the tree, it never failed that one strand would go out. Since we’ve had this tree for two years with great success, I have just been waiting for the other shoe to drop and some of those lights to go out.

And today it did.

Ugh.  A big chunk of the lights are out, and I can’t even imagine trying to untangle what is on there. We have a lot of lights for our other tree, but do you have any suggestions? Has anyone had a pre-lit tree before where the lights went out?


As for now, I’m going to do some intellectual research…

…and start on dinner and a big bottle of wine before Mr. How Sweet comes home and figures out what to do with this tree.