Thank you for posting about the silver Christmas tree. I have very fond memories of my Nana and Grandpa's silver Christmas tree with blue balls hung on them and the color wheel. I have a picture of my grandmother in a very pretty red dress with the mink stole my grandfather gave her for Christmas sitting next to the silver tree with blue balls. When my grandfather passed I took a box of the blue balls with me. My tree is decorated red and white, but I always hang one blue ball to honor my grandparents. It sticks out and I love it! Good times.

Mary, darn you! LOL.... Your post made me go pull out my g-ma's aluminum tree which I got great inspiration for on my previous post... I had my vision, I had my constraints... But I pulled the darn thing out anyway! I agree with you the way to go is with the green.... I'm out of my multitude of recyclables and what I have is just not working! Yours is absolutely adorable! And it is killing me to make myself wait until after the season to fulfill that vision. So the poor thing is stuck in store-room hell. Alex

"Properly installed aluminum wiring itself is not dangerous." Actually, it is. To make the single solid aluminum wire soft enough for use it is in the lower temper grades, harder grades would break in rolling, unrolling, and normal installation handling. This makes it very susceptible to deformation from repeated thermal cycles. The wire becomes loose on the screws used to make connections. This increases the temperature and leads to more loosening, and finally arcing. These problems do not occur with larger stranded aluminum wire since it is much harder. The larger bend radius of the wire prevents fracture problems. Bending 4/0 aluminum is a real chore, and even harder if it is one of the 'tight packed' stranded styles (the overall cable is run through a set of dies after it is assembled but before insulation is added) and the individual strands are compacted so heavily they are no longer round. The termination methods allowed for larger stranded wires also provide better connections. If you want to replace the aluminum you can trade time spent pulling replacement cables against drywall repair time. The old cables do not have to be removed, just disconnected. The new cables do not have to follow the same path as the old, and can be fished in to wall cavities without opening the drywall. Since electricians are more expensive than drywall workers they tend to cut up the drywall to speed the work. A $30+ an hour electrician is not going to spend 30 minutes to save time for a $10 an hour drywall repair. You can do the job more slowly and methodically trading wall repair against wiring time.

The lights are close together because they are meant to wrap around the limb from the tree base and back again then on to the next limb. On a standard width tree that would average 100 lights per foot of tree. It easy to do if you only put down one row of limbs at the time. I can do a nine foot tree in less than three hours. I don't like the prelit trees because most of the trees are too full to decorate so I usually remove one limb per row. Is there a way to remove limbs on the prelits?