O Christmas Tree, Why Do You Cause Me So Much Stress?

Setting up and decorating this year's Christmas tree was quite the event.  Let me explain.  We have a fake tree.  I grew up having real trees, but it's a lot of work to have a real tree, and I am perfectly happy with a fake one.  Anyway.  We keep our tree stored in our upstairs attic storage space.  So, the day after Thanksgiving, I hauled the tree out, one section at a time.   I pulled it through the little attic area and downstairs to our living room.  Getting it out of the attic and hauling it downstairs seemed like enough for me, so I thought maybe we would have a "natural" themed tree this year haha.

I took a break from the tree and hauled out our tubs of Christmas decorations from the attic and put away all of our fall decorations.

After seeing all of the Christmas decorations, I was excited again to decorate the tree.  So I started with the lights.  If you noticed in the first picture, I put our tree in a corner between our couch and love seat.  It's really the only spot we can put it in our living room because this year, we have an extra chair (you can kind of see it in the photo above) in our living room and that is where I normally put the tree.  The tree looks fine in that corner, but it makes it really difficult to decorate, because it is not easy to get the lights around the entire tree in that small space.  

So like I said, I started putting the lights on.  I had a few strands on, when all of a sudden half of one strand decided to go out.  I already had part of that strand on the tree, so I didn't want to take them off (because I'm stubborn).  So I went light by light and found the one that was causing the problem and fixed it.

I got the lights working and eventually got all the lights on the tree.  Everything was working great.  I then put all the ornaments on and I also did some bead garland this year to add a little more to the tree.  I put my sparkley snowflake topper (from Target) on top and admired my work.  A few minutes later, this happened:

The bottom lights went out!  I couldn't believe it.  I already had all the ornaments and garland on, so I couldn't just pull the lights off, I'd have to take the ornaments and garland off too.  And I wasn't about to do that if I didn't have to.  So I messed around the with lights and got them working again.  I think it is the plug on that strand that caused the problem, so I'll throw that strand away when I take the tree down.  But since that day, they have worked fine, so I'm leaving it!

I finally got the lights all working and I really love our tree.  It's nothing fancy, but I love it.  The ornaments are mine and Kevin's from when we were growing up, and some that we have received since we've been together.

This photo is from the day after Thanksgiving.  Tomorrow I'll be showing off all of our Christmas decor, along with more photos of our tree, which now has presents under it.

Do you ever get stressed when decorating your tree?