After Christmas cleanup

For the last couple of days I have been slowly cleaning up around the house...putting away decorations, slowly taking down the tree(s), etc. Which brings me to this...you know those great pre-lit, artificial trees....they are so easy! We got one 3 years ago (I think) and last year I noticed one strand of lights had gone out.
By the time this Christmas season came to a close...another strand went out. Now...up to this point I just added more lights...right over and around the ones that were out. That worked well enough...but
today I decided to just remove the lights on the very top portion. This was even though I remembered a conversation with a friend about how he spent six! hours removing all the lights from his tree. It probably took me 1/2 hr to get the lights off just the top portion...and as I unwound them I realized the companies really DON"T want us to take them off...they hope we will get so aggravated we'll just pitch the tree and buy a new one. So I just kept unwrapping...and thinking about how you have to be a little O.C. to keep at it...but what the heck...once I started I wasn't going to give up.
One half hour or so later I had a big pile of lights and finally some empty "branches" that will be ready for new lights next year!