Do you hear that? That's the sound of jingle bells, Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas," and Christmas tree lights unraveling. That's right, for those who celebrate Christmas in some capacity, it's time to set up, decorate, and light the tree. Well, according to one interior designer, most of us have been lighting the tree wrong our entire lives. Hold up, WHAT?!!
When it comes to stringing lights, if you're like most, you start at the bottom of the Christmas tree and swirl the strands horizontally around your tree, letting the branches catch the strings until you get to the top. If this is how you do it, yeah, that's wrong, apparently.
On the Today Show, designer Francesco Bilotto said that you should actually be hanging the lights vertically, from the top of the tree to the bottom, in order for the lights to be most exposed.
According to Bilotto, going horizontal loses the bulbs in the branches, creating a dull-looking tree.
To do this, you take the end without the plug, start at the top of the tree, and string until you reach the bottom. Then you go back up to the top until your tree is covered. I'm mentally seeing a vertical zig-zag pattern here.
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Another bonus to this method (to the madness, as some would argue), is that it's supposedly much easier to take down the lights post-Christmas since you aren't "fighting a stubborn, almost dried branch," Bilotto told HouseBeautiful.com last year.
"I knew there was a better way … " someone wrote on Facebook about the lighting tip.
But not everyone is into the decorating hack. "Meh," one person on Facebook wrote in reaction to Bilotto's tip. "The picture shown in the article has a ton of gaps compared to my horizontal tree, so I'll just stick with my 'wrong' way, and not care about what you do with your tree."
"That looks terrible," another person added.
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Apparently, the folks who dress up New York City's famous Rockefeller Center tree use the vertical method, so maybe Bilotto knows what's up. But we're not sold. If horizontally around is wrong, we're not sure we want to be right.
