I'm Finally No Longer Bitter about Christmas Trees :)

So, (I feel like if I start my post this way, I'm in the middle of a conversation with all my readers!) on Wednesday night I asked Emily if she wanted to shift the Christmas tree to hide the non-lit strand. She quickly agreed! This required basically redecorating the tree because we had to turn it about 2/3 of the way around and don't have enough ornaments to decorate the back of the tree. But, so far we have not had any more light strand casualties.

As in years past, I will start with the previous year's Christmas tree picture. At the end of the year, Emily threw this tree away. We had to string it up to keep it from tilting last year. She bought a new tree that is a couple feet taller. Last year we had to buy lots more strands of lights. I prepared Emily that we would probably have to buy more. We estimated how many more. Neither of us estimated this many:
YIKES! I'll admit, I was a little ashamed to admit how many lights are on the tree this year. Emily let the cat out of the bag on Facebook. The problem is, once I start one way, when I run out of lights, I have two options: 1)take them all off and start over. 2)go out and buy more. Emily, yet again, was a good sport and went out twice to get more lights. The end result. 35 strands. But remember, one strand doesn't work :)

It's like a Where's Waldo...can you spot where the original missing strand went out? After this strand, the one right next to it went out. That is when I began to lose all love for well-lit Christmas trees. Once I replaced those two, the strand up from that went out. It is still currently out, but at the back of the tree now.

A close-up of the unlit strand.

And one last shot with the pretty snow from last weekend in the background. I think this was after I replaced the two strands and before the third strand went out. So this is the Christmas tree with 3500 lights lit in full glory!