The Twelve Days Of Christmas: Day 1

Christmas is coming! -- Fear not! I have treaded the waters of the festive season. All of November I've been running a muck to share some of my tips and tricks to making the smoothest holiday season. The stockings are hung by the radiator with care in hopes of a magical holiday season will soon be here.

Now if you're anything like me, the tree is one of the most pinnacle parts to creating just the right mood, you may choose cool hues of blue, or warm hints of red... but in the end, it is quite literally the focal point in many living rooms over the month of December.

One of my fondest memories growing up were the stories of my Grandfathers pride in his tree. My mom always recounts the tales of family members coming over and congratulating him on having the best and largest tree in the family. The tinsel all strung individually throughout each branch with such precision reflecting the luminous tree.

The tradition of treedom has not stopped in our family, each year my mother puts up a magnificent spruce in our home covered in garlands and ribbons a plenty.

So what did I do on November 5th? -- I started putting up my Christmas tree -- It started a bit something like this:

While the rest of my room looked a bit like this:

One of the best tricks for artificial trees that cannot be stressed enough is when working on sprucing out the branches, always push the interior branches almost vertically up and as you progress to the front start to angle straight out. What does this do? It gives your tree a very full look, not only that but it also makes it easier to add ornaments and lights later and then you don't get the bare look in the center.

Before:

After:

And we can fast forward a few long hours of work by this photo montage:

Well that was easy! -- Ok! You know I'm telling a fib. We all know that putting up a Christmas tree is a lot of work -- especially when it's not a pre lit tree. -- One thing to remember if you're not blessed with a pre lit tree is for proper coverage and to give your tree that "glam" effect you're looking at (at least) 100 lights per foot -- example my tree is 7.5 ft so I would need roughly 750 lights.

Last year I ran short right near the end for Christmas lights, this year the exact same thing happened... which resulted in me having to stop shy of 9 hours of tree primping and lighting. Which actually worked in my favor, I'm not sure if this happens to everyone or just me but be it Christmas baking, Christmas decorating or wrapping presents anything over 8 hours I kind of start to get weird and go from "Normal" to this:

And I'm usually covered in glitter. -- Now -- I'm going to go primp my tree and get it ready for the big reveal tomorrow.

Happy Holidays Dear Friends -- Michael