As a child, Christmas was a wonderful holiday full of magical events. Every year my family, and I would pile into the car just to get a glimpse of beautifully decorated houses. Christmas lights have always had the ability to turn even the ugliest house on the block, into a colorful, gleaming beauty to me.

Another Christmas tradition for us was to decorate the tree together, as a family. Choosing a day that would work for everyone was a difficult task, especially as we grew older but my mother still insisted on this tradition.

Each year my dad would get the ball rolling by pulling out all, and untangling the lights from last year, and plugging each one in. Many times they no longer worked due to burn out, or missing bulbs. My oldest brother’s job was to track down the reason why the lights didn’t work, and fix the problem. Mean while, the rest of us would wait, and wait some more.

As silly as it sounds, these are some of the best memories that I have about Christmas as a child. I really don’t remember each present that I have gotten over the years, but I do remember all of the time we shared together getting ready for Christmas.

Now that I am grown, with children of my own it is very important to me to create the same type of memories for my kids. The one’s that will last throughout their whole lifetime, and hopefully they can think back and smile, too.

Keeping the Christmas tree decorating tradition has been rather hard, due to our family’s hectic schedules. I work during the day, and my husband works at night so finding the time to decorate the tree has been torture. We actually have tons of presents waiting for the tree to be displayed, instead of a tree waiting for presents.

Thankfully last year we updated our artificial tree, to one of those Prelit Christmas Tree’s. I had never realized how much of a time saver this would be for our family. I couldn’t wait to tell my parents, I knew they would be in awe over the idea, too.

Once everyone had arrived, the process began. My husband pulled the tree out from the box, and placed it on it’s stand. My brother plugged in each piece.. the top, the center, and the bottom then he simply plugged it into the wall socket. That was it, our Christmas tree was beautifully lit with bright colored bulbs, and was ready to be decorated. These Prelit Christmas trees shaved off about three hours time from our previous tradition. I couldn’t believe it!

I really thought we were going to have to let our family decorating tradition die but, by using a Prelit Christmas Tree we were able to carry on our family tradition alive. Now we can focus on creating memories with this kids, rather than searching down broken, or burnt bulbs.

If your family is as busy as mine, you may want to consider buying an artificial tree with bulbs already strategically placed on the branches. The time you will save will be well worth your investment.