Several years ago Teri and I decided to stop using “live” Christmas trees, and only use artificial ones.  I don’t know what the “correct” environmental thing to do here, but we’ve always felt bad about killing live trees just for our holiday festivities.  So we have bought several artificial Christmas trees to decorate our house over the holidays.

Yesterday Teri and I went up into the attic and dragged out our big artificial Christmas Tree. We had forgotten how big and heavy it is - we didn’t set that one up last year (we used a smaller tree last year.) It sure was awkward! I remember now that when we hauled it up into the attic what a hard time we had! It barely squeezed through the hatch! We’ve agreed to store it in the basement from now on! It’s a 7′ tall tree, pre-lit. It only took a few minutes to put together, there were only three sections and the stand to assemble. Unfortunately, after it was all assembled and plugged in, we found that one of the sections of tree has a string of lights that won’t light up. We’re sure that everything is plugged in correctly, so we have to assume one of the lights is burnt out (or missing) on that string, or the string is shorted out.

I don’t want to spend hours trying to troubleshoot that string of lights, so I guess I’m going to just dig out a string of lights stored in one of the decorations boxes and string it on that section of tree. Yeah, I’m feeling lazy all right! But at least the tree is up, and hopefully we’ll be decorating it over the next couple of days.