December has rolled around and with it my annual battle against the Christmas tree lights has commenced. We upgraded to LEDs some years ago, so the day-long rigmarole of trying to locate the blown bulbs is at least a thing of the past.

However, the perfectionist streak in me remains aggravated that I can never get the blasted things on the tree to my satisfaction. I've tried:

- Winding them around the tree (horizontally, corkscrewing up the tree). However, we have several sets of lights in two colours (blue and silver FTW). The bottom half of the tree always seems to be out of sync with the top half.

- Winding in and out along the branches ("z-axis" for want of a better word). This is better than the horizontal winding, but seems to be a bit patchy. The string of lights inevitably runs out before I reach the top/bottom and it takes me several attempts to get it to my satisfaction.

- This year I tried going up and down around the tree (perhaps "vertical winding" or zig-zagging?). That has produced the best results so far, although now the top of the tree is noticably brighter than the bottom. There are also still some clumps of lights.

How do you wind your Xmas lights on the tree?

And yes, I am aware that it's weird that I spend time thinking about this sort of thing. But where else but Geekzone could I pose such a question of national significance.