Light housekeeping

One of my favorite cross-stitched ornaments on our living room tree

We ran into a couple of dilemmas with our pre-lit Christmas trees this year and I thought Mr. T's ingenious solution well worth sharing!

In the living room, we have a pre-lit tree with white lights.  In the bedroom, a pre-lit tree with colored lights.  Last year, the colored lights stopped working and so we simply added a separate string of colored lights that did work. 

Near the end of the Christmas season last year, the white lights, just on the top section of the living room tree, stopped working.  We'd forgotten about that until setting it up this year, and wanted to find a short string of white lights to use for that part of the tree.  We hadn't been successful in finding a short string -- we thought 20 lights would be just about right -- but then, on our outing with the grandkids, my hubby happened upon these in a discount store:

They are called rocky icicle lights.  The ones he found were white.

He looked them over carefully and decided that he could remove the "icicle" part from each light, leaving a string of 20 white lights.  When we got them home, he did just that, and strung them on the top of the tree.  Problem solved!

And then he thought of a use for the leftover rocky icicles.  He decided to clip them in place over  20 of the colored lights on our upstairs tree.  Voila!

You can see the "colored" rocky icicles interspersed with the regular colored lights.

It turned out to be such a pretty effect that when he went back to the discount store after Christmas, he picked up a set of the colored rocky icicle lights at half price.  Next year we will add them to the upstairs tree.  Pretty ingenious -- and inexpensive too -- solutions to our tree light dilemma!