Lighting a Christmas Tree 2018

Christmas

Deck the halls with the results of my Christmas tree model! And learn how live trees fail to behave as cones! Wow!

Published

December 25, 2018

Figure 1
I applied my work from last year to the 2018 Christmas Tree and am pretty happy with the results. The tree in Figure 1 was the final product. At the After-Christmas sales last year I got some red, white, and green ornaments with the goal of doing a tri-color tree this year. My hope was to make nice balanced bands but things didn’t quite turn out like I had hoped. I mean, they still turned out good-ish but not quite up to my hopes.

 

Lessons From 2018

Figure 2
  • Different color lights do not appear equally bright. I noticed the white lights seemed much brighter than the red, and the red much brighter than the green. I ended up making the white band with two strands, the red with three, and the green with four.
  • Real trees are lumpy and limp. My tree had a bald spot and some weird branch spacing that made placing the precisely calculated strands into a very “approximate” undertaking. Also, the branches began to sag under the weight of the lights and ornaments. An animated gif of the tree as I put lights on it shows what I mean. Look at the lower right side - it travels almost a foot under the weight of the lights.
  • Silver ornaments look like a hole in your Christmas tree. I began with some silver ornaments as well but removed them because they looked like a big hole in the tree.
  • At some point you get tired of measuring and just eye-ball it. That happened sort of quick for me, and the result was that the green sections are a little wider, but again, overall, I’m happy with how it turned out.

Christmas just flew by this year, and Target started their sale the week before Christmas so I missed out of the sweet deals that would have made next Christmas a calculus problem as well. Unless Target wants to be my corporate sponsor? I mean, what says “Christmas” more than path integrals? Answer: nothing, except maybe like peace and good-will towards your fellow man, but definitely also path integrals.

Happy 2019!