Kraig Ware: Hi, I am Kraig Ware with Christmas Decor of Greater Richmond. We are out showing you how to decorate your home or business using Christmas lights. Now we are going to show you how to decorate a small or mid size tree with a trunk or branch technique. It a awesome way to make a great impact on your property but there are few simple tips that I want to give to make sure that your branch wrap is effective. First of all make sure that your plug are off the ground meaning you can take that plug, use some electrical tape and secure the bulb at the ground so it doesn't get wet. Secondly start your connections then and create a random impact as you start to come up that trunk. That is going to give you a very loose and we don't want anything straight or symmetrical on the trunk. You want to make sure it's all random. From there are you pick the arteries of the trunks if you will as they go out. You don't have to do all of them for a great effect but you do need to make sure that it is balance from the curve. So once you start to get up that tree, step back a little bit, come back and look at that tree and make sure the tree is balanced and you get lots of height.

And remember when you are using mini lights always work with them on. That way if there is a short in the strand you are going to see it right away. Now when we are doing a branch wrap, it's imperative that as you go up that trunk and you run your lights up that branch to make sure that they are evenly distributed. And don't go from one branch to another, don't jump across. What that does is create a straight line plus when the wind comes the branches start to move back and forth that can cause some damage on the fixtures themselves and that is going to cause a short and your system going to fail. After you got the trunk and the branches just right in the way you like them, there is another way to add a little bit of flair to your tree and that's a puddle or a tear drop technique. A tear drop is going to be suspending in different levels throughout the tree, lights sort of dropping down, not quite touching the ground in some cases. Whereas the puddle technique is really going to allow that light to drop all the way on to the shrubs, down on to walkways, and to the landscape beds and literally puddle out just like a water puddle would in the winter. It is a awesome beautiful effect in the evening. If you are doing a puddle technique or a tear drop technique make sure that you put out some flags again for the landscape folks, for the yard people, anyone that's going to be working around your home. That way they won't step and damage your lighting system. So that's going to give you some great ideas on how to decorate a small or mid sized tree with a trunk, branch, puddle and tear drop technique.

Next we are going to look at how to decorate your shrubs with a canopy wrap.