The tree is up and decorated. It looks great. My roommate is beside himself. He told me today that it's the first tree's he's put up since 1990. He just kept stepping back from it saying it's so beautiful, it's so beautiful. It was great pulling my ornaments out as we began putting decorations on the tree. I haven't had them out of the box since 2001 and I'd forgotten about many of them. I'd open a box and immediately get excited as I began to take them out and put them on the tree. The hardest part of the evening was deciding what ornaments to leave off the tree. I have enough ornaments to decorate two trees one of which is usually 10 or so feet tall. This is year I am putting up one tree that's about 7'6" tall. All of the nice ornaments made it on, and we ended up just leaving off the glass balls. We finished up by putting "icicles" on the tree. According to C.Z. he's never had a tree that didn't have them. In fact he had this very specific system of how to approach putting them on the tree, so much so that I stopped helping and ate dinner. It took almost as long for him to finish this task as it did to decorate the whole tree. It's finished though, and it looks great and I'll have pictures in the next day or so.