Hi! I’m Cheri Hennessy. We’re here at the Christmas Attic today to show you how to decorate a truly special Christmas tree. We're going to start today with the lights. I’m going to show you on this seven and a half foot tree right here. It's just a standard tree that you would have in your home. Typically, most people are familiar with these small miniature lights and that's what I’m going to show you how to put on here and then I'll tell you a little bit about some other sets of lights.
The most important thing when you are putting a set of lights on the tree is to make sure that you change branches. You go from section to section on the inside of the tree not on the outside. If you change branches on the outside, you'll notice all you’re going see are cords. You're going to wrap your branches, you start on the inside and you anchor it down in there. Artificial trees are wonderful to decorate with because they're made with wire and you can kind of use that wire to clamp and get started.
You want to wrap gently around the branch, come out to the tip and you want to wrap back. Wrapping back in to the center of the tree’s key. If you don't go into the center of the tree and then you use another branch on the inside, you kind of hold it in place and you go to the next branch. All right? Now you can't see where I went from here. Now you’ll just do the same thing and you go in circles, and you go around the tree and you’ll always decorate the tree when you’re starting with the lights from the bottom and go to the top, just like so. All right?
Don't wrap them too tightly. If you wrap them too tightly, it makes your tree look kind of flat. You have an artificial tree to begin with, you don't want to mash down all your little branches. You’re going to continue to put the lights on as we have shown from the bottom to the top of the tree and we're going to come back in a minute and show you the completed product. And here is our beautiful finished Christmas tree, a seven and half foot tree, full of lights.
You're probably wondering how many lights does it take to fill a tree of this size. Let's start with a small tree. Small tree, three to four feet, you're going to use three to four sets of lights. That's easy to remember and you double it for the next size. Say a four to a five feet tree, you’d go up to double that to six to eight sets of lights and by the time you get to a big tree like this, which is, what most of you are decorating, you're up to 12-16 sets of lights.
The next thing I’m going to show you is I’m going to tell you a little bit about how to pick the kinds of lights you want in your tree. A lot of us go with the easy choice and this is what I do at home is the basic white lights. This is actually two types of white lights. It's a clear light and a frosted light.
This tree on this side is showing you a multicolored set. This particular multicolored set is called Candyland. It's got three different pink and green and yellow, and you would want to use it with a candy type theme or kid’s toy theme. It would limit you some what somewhat but it's sure it's nice to see the colors. This tree here is showing you the LED lights. This is the newest light technology, Light Emitting Diodes. I’m not quite sure what that means, except for I know that it saves a lot of energy. You can have these lights on your tree and that'll use 1/10th of the electricity than a typical set of lights does and they're doing all sorts of exciting things with these lights. Right now, you see that C7 old fashioned bulb, it used to be so hot, you couldn't put your hand on it. This bulb is actually a little LED light inside with a cover. It looks just like an old-fashioned C7 light, uses a lot less energy, and it's a lot safer.
Next, I’m going to show you how to put twinkle lights on a tree. Twinkle lights are my secret of how to add really a magic twinkle to your Christmas tree really easily. You only need one set of twinkle lights as far as I’m concerned. Put too many twinkle lights on the magic leaves and it's a little too busy but what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you how to take this one set and this is a 90 light set of micro bulbs. They’re even smaller than your typical Christmas bulbs and we're going to put them on the tree kind of in an 'S' shape, up and down the tree and you just tuck them gently in the tree. You can kind of put them in and then you can tuck as you go along. Then you go back and forth, start at the top and work your way down because most people are going to see the top of your tree.
First, my kids would usually kind of standing up looking at the tree. Alright, I’ve tucked that in there a bit. Tuck, tuck, you're going to lift and tuck. Here, we have our completed Christmas tree. We've got beautiful lights on it now and the twinkle lights have really added a special magic to the tree which is so important in Christmas time. Even though the tree looks beautiful with just lights and next we're going to put the rest of the decorations on the tree.