A Charlie Brown Christmas tree

Well to all of our family and friends.
This year we had gotten our tree later than usual, due to trips and, well as we all know, a busy life. Better late than never.
So we got our 7' tree (yay) and a beautiful wreath for the front door. (decorated this year, with a beautiful bow and decorations, thank you David for spoiling us)
So to continue, everyone knows that you have to let the tree "relax" before you decorate it, we of course did, for a few hours. When we began to get everything ready to begin decorations, lo & behold, the bottom was full an beautiful, just the way the ferrets love it to play on, however, right about the middle of the tree it looked as if someone had chopped away all the branches, then an ok top. So I said "I can fill it in with lights and such, it just needs some TLC"
So I began putting on our 300 light string, filling in all the gaps & so on. Being very excited to turn on the lights and see how it looks before putting on garland, and ornaments. So I plug it in and guess what?????????????????, only 1/2 of the lights work. I tried a couple of different lights to see if they would light up, all to no avail. I took off all the lights, all the while, still being cheery, having 2 more sets of lights, we had enough. I plugged them in first to see if they would light. what do you think happened?? No lights. and of course it's too late to go buy any this late at night.
Next day (Sunday) We ran to CVS, because the Sunday before Christmas is not the day you want to go into any big stores, deals or not deals, neither Dave or I like crowds. So we bought this 18 foot string of lights, should have been enough right????? Wrong again. So at this point, I think we both thought we were just going to have an expensive ferret toy.
Back to the store. Wouldn't you know it, they had no more of those lights. So we had to go to a different store. They had many lights. (I got 2 long sets just to be on the safe side.) Finally I had enough lights to go around the whole tree. (Whew) Next garland and decorations. Of course there is one decoration that goes on before the garland and that is David's and my first ornament together, a precious moments one, that says "our first Christmas 2006". David put his Santa clause topper on the tree, and my fiber-optic Angel goes on just below it, symbolizing how we took our 2 households & 2 lives and turned them into one.

Our tree is up and is beautiful, our stockings are hung by the chimney with care.
We wish all of you a Very Merry Christmas.

By all means please comment or let us know what your Christmas set up was.