Pre-Lit Christmas Tree Struggles

With Thanksgiving past we're moving on to Christmas! This past weekend many of us got up in the attic and pulled out our boxes of Christmas decorations and the pre-lit artificial tree to get it ready for the most important holiday on the calendar, Christmas!

We've had the same tree for about nine years now, it's an awesome looking tree that came with 1500 lights on it! When it's lit, it looks like a Maine lighthouse on the coastal shores in a storm this thing is so bright! In the past I've had trouble with one section of lights and could never get them to work so I just hid that area to the wall, this year when I assembled the tree I couldn't hide that section any longer because four other sections decided not to work too!

After pushing in a few bulbs two of the lower sections worked and I was left with the two sections on the top of the tree. I tried and tried and couldn't get them to work, so we were going to go buy a new tree until we saw the prices for them. I wasn't going to spend $250 to $350 on a new tree with comparable number of lights on a same size tree so I decided I was just going to replace the non-functioning lights.

Once we got back home, I began pulling he lights off of the two foot section tree top and was going to add regular strands of lights, something I'm sure you've done too! I had no idea how long it would take to remove the lights from this little two foot section, I thought it would be about fifteen minutes or so, but I was about to find out just how long it took.

Two hours and fifteen minutes later along with removing around four hundred little horseshoe shaped barbed hooks I was done! There were two or three clips per light bulb to hold that little incandescent light in place. As I was removing all of those clips I was thinking someone had to take the time to put all of these on there to keep the light in place. Once this was done, I wrapped around a hundred lights on the top of the tree and I thought it looked great. Standing back and looking at it, you couldn't tell I added those lights myself!

I just don't understand how something like this happens, when packed it up last year everything worked and when I pulled it out this year I had this problem. I know it happens to people all the time and it's just something we have to accept and become troubleshooters!