Christmas Clean Up

As I had mentioned before, we celebrate our Christmas Day on December 24th.  Generally, I have the tree down by December 25th.  We still have not had the Schwartz Family Christmas at my in-laws, so technically it is still Christmas.  But it might be time to take the tree down when:

It seems like there are more needles on the floor than on your tree.  Trust me, this picture does no justice to the amount of needles sprinkled amongst my carpet.

A spider has set up residence on the tree topper.

All the ornaments that had been re-located off the poor bottom branches have mysteriously found their way to once again dangle inches from the carpet.

Half the tree you painstakingly lit, after multiple trips to Walgreens for more lights, has burnt out.

The only thing holding me back from just pitching the whole thing on the street after yanking my mom's red wooden beads off and the star, would be the 15 strands of lights I purchased this year.  Since I will be forced to remove everything from the tree in order to get the lights off, I wonder if there will be a single needle left on the tree when I am finished.