Goodbye Old Tree :(

Well, today I had to say goodbye to mine and Dave's first Christmas tree. We were married in October of 2002, and since he didn't have a tree, we used my old four foot tree for our first Christmas together. We moved the coffee table in front of the fireplace, and set the tree up on that. It was at the end of it's rope, but with lots of branch bending, and careful placement of ornaments, we managed to fill in all the holes. What great memories...
After Christmas, we decided to take advantage of the sales, and buy our very own Christmas tree. I wanted multi-colored lights. Don't misunderstand me. I think clear lights are very pretty, and clean looking, but, too me, they lack the warmth I associate with childhood Christmases. Dave didn't have a preference at the time, but over the years, he's become a multi fan. We found this beautiful, 7.5 foot, prelit tree at, of all places, Walmart. We fell in love with it, because of the big bulbs strategically paced among the mini lights. This made the tree stand out from the rest...and even more amazing...it was 75% off!
So this has been our tree for the eight years we've been married. Last year, I could tell it was beginning to fail, because several strings of lights had gone out, leaving dark areas, but we were going to use this tree one last time. We had to discard the bottom portion because of a large Max-shaped dent, where he had climbed up a few branches and settled for a nap (Man, I still miss him so much). Being a 17 pound cat, he bent them beyond repair. So we set the coffee table in front of the fireplace, like we did that first Christmas, and assembled the top two portions of our tree. We took a string of lights to fill in the dark areas that had burned out. It wasn't perfect, but it was useable for one more year. Then something dreadful happened. We started screwing in the big bulbs only to discover that a whole string of them had burned out. Nothing we did could save the tree, because these particular strings cannot be found anymore. I had to cry a little, because I really loved this tree, but I'll never have to say good by to all the memories. I've included last year's picture of this tree in this post. Goodbye Old friend...