The Tacky Christmas Lights

Last year in our first year of marriage, Derrick and I were ultra-lame (lamer than usual) and didn't even bother to get a Christmas tree.  We blame the fact that Derrick was at the end of his first semester of law school and was hibernating at the library studying for finals and didn't have time to get one.

This year is different!  We were bound and determined to get our very first family Christmas tree!

Weeks ago, we thought ahead and picked up a stand and some lights, even stopping to discuss how many we thought we would need.  "300?"  "Yeah, that should be enough."

Yesterday, we braved the cold, winter Philadelphia streets in search of the perfect tree - nothing could stop us!  Except wine and brunch, but then on we went again in our search!

A whole half-block away we picked up our tree and brought it home.  Derrick carried its heavy, bountiful body up the stairs of our walk-up and hand-sawed its trunk.  After an hour of preparation and balancing, voila!  A perfect tree, ready for decorating!

I swiftly got to work on the lights after bragging to Derrick about how good I was at string-lighting a tree.  But something was amiss.

We had accidentally picked up lights with WHITE CORDS instead of GREEN!!!  Not only that, we barely had enough to cover the top half of the tree!

How could I have been so careless?  Christmas is Derrick's favorite holiday.  He even has a Christmas Excitement Dance that involves him jumping up and down yelling "CHRISTMAS!  CHRISTMAS!  CHRISTMAS!"  Here's how it goes:

So you can imagine his disappointment when he saw our tacky white-cord-lighted, awful Christmas tree.  He was devastated.  I had failed as a wife.

After a few tears, we jumped in the car walked 10 blocks to our car and drove around in search of proper tree lights.  For whatever reason, the first store was completely out of normal-people lights, but they were brimming with giant LED lights, snowflake-shaped lights, Jesus-shaped lights, red, blue, purple, pink, gold lights, and any other unnecessary novelty light you can think of.

I decided we would steal lights off of someone's house before we went home empty-handed.

Thankfully, the second store we went to had industrial-sized coils left, so we went home with 800,000 perfect lights.

Christmas was saved!