When I was growing up, Dad always waited till Christmas Eve to get a tree. Part of it was that he worked late-ish most nights, so when was he going to get one? Another part was that we always got our trees from one or another local farm, so we weren't dependent on tree sellers, who have usually sold all the good trees by mid-December. I think the other part was that with his old strings of serially-wired Christmas lights you could only really guarantee that they'd all be lit on Christmas if you had only put them up the day before.
The result of this is that I don't start to feel like getting a tree or even decorating the house until the last week before Christmas, whereas everyone else has practically had their lights up since Black Friday. So this morning, Mrs. GeneJockey and I were discussing the lights, which are an old set of outdoor lights we got when The Younger Boy was a baby 29 years ago, with C9 incandescent bulbs. Should we replace them with new LED lights? And that got me to thinking about LED lights. They're WAY more efficient and far less likely to set your tree on fire, but they don't generate the heat required to make Noma Bubble-Lites bubble.
Dad had, originally, 4 strings of these. Then 3, then he had to start splicing out bad sockets. The last year he put them up, sometime in the 80s, there were only 4 working sockets, but he insisted on putting them on the tree for the little kids.