A Green Christmas

Christmas is going to be a little greener at our house this year.

When we moved here in 2000 we had a small artificial Christmas tree. Shortly thereafter my mom downsized trees and gave us her old tree which was quite large. So large in fact that we had a hard time getting it to stay straight in its plastic stand. We had to tie it to the ceiling to keep it upright. Four years ago, shortly after we had finished decorating it, the stand broke and the tree crashed to the floor. The way we remember it, the tree actually landed on one of us. I don't know if that's true or not, I think it is though. The way the tree was designed, there was no way to get it to work without the original stand, which was useless at that point.

We bought a new tree that year (2004.) We wanted a big tree again, but this time we opted for a pre-lit model, "so we would never have to worry about the lights again." We had a beautiful tree that Christmas. 1,500 lights! It was a marvel. The thing caught your eye from the Hartman Street bridge over Berlin Court Ditch for Pete's sake!

After wrestling this monster out of our attic in 2005 we discovered that a whole section of branches failed to light. Kristi called the company's Christmas tree hot-line and since it was under warranty they mailed us a new section for free.

The warranty had expired as Christmas 2006 rolled around and so did another section of lights.

Last year the entire second row of branches went dark. The tree was really a little too big anyway. (The bottom row spanned halfway across our living room.) So, we decided to remove the bottom row of branches, hack the pole off and remove the lights from the new bottom row and put our own lights on.

Removing lights from a pre-lit tree is NOT an easy task. Using wire cutters, it took Kristi and I about two hours to get the lights off of this one row of branches.

As Christmas drew closer that year, our tree grew darker. Sections of the pre-lit lights continued to go out.

I'm not sure what we were thinking at the end of 2007. Maybe we were just hoping that a summer spent in a hot attic would cure our sick tree. However, when we set the tree up Friday night, even more sections of lights were not working.

We decided it was time for a new tree. Kristi called her mom and dad and we all headed out to find a new tree. It would be smaller, with energy efficient LED lights. As we looked, we realized that we really liked the looks of the tree we already had. .. if it would just be a little smaller and have working lights. So, we decided not to buy a new tree at all, but instead to take off another section from the bottom of our tree (to shrink it further,) hack off the pole some more, remove ALL of the pre-lit lights, and buy LED lights to put on the tree. We even had two sets of extra hands along to help us remove the existing lights.

How long does it take four adults and two seven year-olds to remove the lights from a 7 1/2 foot tree? Four HOURS! (Keep in mind, we didn't even remove the lights from the two biggest rows of branches.)

After we had worked on removing lights for a couple of hours, I joked to Kristi's parents that this was our plan for the evening all along - we had no intention of buying a new tree in the first place. Ha! Not really! But as you can probably imagine at this point in the story, we were incredibly thankful to have their help.

In the end, we have the same tree. It's shorter. It's just right for our living room. We will be able to leave it all put together to store it. It is energy efficient, it will only cost us about $2 in electricity to light it this year (as opposed to about $20 before.) It works! And we will never have to worry about Christmas lights again. . . maybe I shouldn't have typed that.