Every holiday season, when you hang the lights on your tree, the crossing strands form a mess that’s a bear to remove. But there’s a solution: The trick is to go up and down, not around and around.
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Plug the lights in before you begin, to weed out defective bulbs. Leave them plugged in as you place them so you can spot dark spaces in the tree.
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Divide the tree vertically into three sections and complete one section at a time.
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Beginning at the bottom, weave each string in and out of the branches, to the top of the tree and back down.
Decorators at New York City’s Rockefeller Center (and who would know better how to light a tree?) use a trunk-to-tip method to create “not just a shell of light but an inner glow and a three-dimensionality that cannot be achieved any other way,” says David Murbach, the manager of the center’s gardens division.
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