Hykolity 7.5 ft Christmas Tree: An Honest Review

The first thing I want to say about the hykolity 7.5 ft prelit tree is that I did not want to like it. For more than twenty years I strung a bare 7 foot artificial tree by hand every November, working through a tangle of light strings, testing bulbs one at a time, and starting over when a whole strand went dark. It took a full afternoon and it put me in a mood for the rest of the weekend. Three Novembers ago I bought the hykolity, and the old tree went out to the curb the same week.

This is not a review where everything is wonderful. The tree has real strengths and it has a few things that will bother you, and which of those matters more depends on your living room and your patience. I am 62, I live in Zanesville, Ohio, and I decorate this house myself. My husband Gary carries the boxes up from the basement and that is the extent of his involvement. What follows is what four seasons of doing this alone has taught me, in the order I would tell a neighbor over the fence.

How I've Used It

The tree stands in the front window of our living room, which is the one spot in this house where a tree is visible from the sidewalk. It is plugged into a single outlet behind it and I never think about a cord again until January. Gary hauls the carton up the basement stairs the weekend after Thanksgiving, I put the tree together, and it comes down the first weekend of January along with everything else.

Assembly takes me about twenty minutes. The branches are hinged, so they fold down from the center and you are not sorting pieces or matching letters on a tag. Fluffing is the rest of the job, and I will get to that in a minute, because it is the part nobody warns you about and the biggest difference between a tree that looks like a tree and a tree that looks like a wire frame with branches hanging off it.

Before this tree, the weekend after Thanksgiving meant a full afternoon on the floor with the old bare 7 foot one. I would unbox the light strands, plug them in end to end to see what still worked, and then sit there swapping bulbs with a tester in one hand. One year a strand went dark right across the front in the middle of December, and I spent an evening on my knees behind the tree while Gary held a flashlight at an angle so I could see the sockets. That was the year I started reading about prelit trees. The hykolity took that afternoon off my calendar and I have not missed it once.

Every year the lights have come on. That was the fear I had about buying a prelit tree, because a dark strand on a hand strung tree is an irritation and a dark section on a prelit tree sounds like a ruined purchase. In four seasons that has not happened. I plug it in, the whole tree lights, and I go do something else.

The tree holds ornaments well. Mine are a mix of things the children made in school, a few glass pieces that came from my mother, and some heavier round ones Gary and I bought the first year we were married. The tips are flexible enough that I can nestle a heavy ornament down into the branches instead of hanging it off the end of a twig, and nothing has slid off. It has 1,450 tips, which is why there is somewhere to put things.

Most evenings I turn it on around five and leave it until I go up to bed. It is the only lit thing in that window, and from the couch it does what I want a tree to do, which is make the room feel finished without my having to think about it again. That sounds like a small thing. It is the whole reason I bought it.

What Nobody Tells You About Putting It Up

Forty minutes. That is my honest number for shaping the branches, and I have gotten faster at it. The first year took closer to an hour because I did not understand what I was doing. Every one of those 1,450 tips has been squashed flat in a box for eleven months, and you have to work from the trunk outward and separate them one at a time. If you skip that, you get holes, and the tree has a silhouette like a bad haircut when you see it from the street.

Here is the order that works for me. I start with the bottom section, the widest one, and go around it clockwise with both hands, pulling each tip away from the trunk and then fanning the smaller branchlets out from it. The middle section gets the same treatment. The top section I save for last, because it is the part you see up close from a step stool and it is easy to talk yourself out of finishing. When all three are done I walk to the doorway at the back of the living room and look from there, which is the only honest way to spot the flat spots. Then I go back and fix them. Two passes, and the second one is always faster than the first.

This is not a knock on the hykolity in particular. Any full tree with that many tips will ask the same of you. It is worth knowing before you buy, because if you are picturing a tree that comes out of the box looking like a photograph, you will be disappointed by this one, and probably by every other one you look at.

The other thing is the carton. It goes back in the same box it arrived in, and that box lives on a shelf in our unfinished basement for eleven months. It is a large carton and it is not light. If you have no shelf, no garage corner and no spare closet for it, that is a real consideration and you should think it through before you order. Gary carries it up. I could drag it across a floor, but I would not want to take it up a flight of stairs myself.

And put the tree where you want it before you decorate it. My second year I decided it would look better six inches to the left, and moving a decorated 7.5 foot tree is a two person job that undoes half your fluffing. Decide first, then shape, then hang.

Four seasons, 450 bulbs, and every one of them has come on every November. That is the part I did not expect to be able to say.

The Lights: 450 Warm White and No Choices to Make

There are 450 warm white LED lights on this tree and no decisions to make about them. They are warm white, they come on when you plug the tree in, and they stay warm white. If you like switching between coloured lights one year and white the next, this is not the tree for that. I wanted warm white and only warm white, so it suits me fine.

The tree plugs into the one outlet behind it, and that is the entire electrical routine for the year. I run the cord down behind the stand, plug it in the weekend after Thanksgiving, and unplug it the first weekend of January. The old tree had several separate strands that I wound onto a coat hanger every January to keep them from tangling in storage, and even then something came out knotted the next November. Losing that one small chore has been worth more to me than I expected it to be.

Warm white is the softer, slightly golden light, not the bright white that reads almost blue. In a brick house with wood trim and an old mantel, it looks right. It also photographs warmly, which matters more to me now than it used to, because both of our children live out of town and most of what they see of our Christmas is a picture on a phone.

450 lights on a 7.5 foot tree is generous in the front and thinner in the back. There are darker pockets deeper in the branches where the light does not reach, mostly on the side against the wall where nobody looks. From the couch, and from the sidewalk through the window, it reads as full and warm. I would call the coverage comfortable rather than abundant. If you want a tree that looks lit from the inside out, you will want more lights than this, and you will pay for them.

I turn the back toward the wall and let the front do the work. That is not a compromise I love, it is just what the tree asks for, and after four years I have stopped noticing.

The listing says flame resistant. I have never tested that and I hope never to. I mention it only because it was on my list when I was comparing trees, and it is one of those things you want on the sheet whether or not you ever think about it again.

Size, Stand, and the Floor Space Nobody Mentions

I measured our corner with a tape measure before I ordered, and I am glad I did. From the window wall to the edge of the doorway is 60 inches, which leaves about 6 inches of breathing room around a 54 inch base. That sounds fine on paper. In practice it means the coffee table moved a foot toward the kitchen for five weeks, and we both walked past the tree a little more carefully than usual until January. If that corner had measured 50 inches, I would have bought something smaller and been glad of it.

The tree is 90 inches tall and 54 inches across at the base. The height I had planned for. The width caught me off guard. Four and a half feet across means the tree is genuinely in the room, not tucked against a wall, and you want to be able to walk around it without turning sideways. Ours fits because that corner by the window is dead space the other eleven months of the year. In a smaller living room I would measure twice before ordering.

The stand is metal and it has done its job. I set the tree up in late November, decorate it, and it has not leaned or tipped or needed a shim under one leg. Gary checks it once, the way he checks things, and then we both forget it is there until January.

One more thing about size. In our living room the top tip comes within a few inches of the ceiling, so I have never used a topper. If a star or an angel is part of your tradition, measure your ceiling height before you order anything 90 inches tall. That is not a complaint about this tree. It is arithmetic that people forget, me included.

What Four Seasons Have Actually Done to It

Nothing has broken on this hykolity tree. No branch has snapped, no light section has failed, and the stand has not bent. It goes up, comes down, goes back in the box and sits on a basement shelf in a room that gets damp in the summer. That is the test I actually care about, because I have bought decorations that looked fine in December and came out of storage a year later looking tired.

The branches hold their shape from year to year, though they still need the full forty minutes of shaping. I have not noticed it shedding or leaving bits on the rug, which I did worry about, having seen artificial trees that dropped plastic for a whole season and left it in the carpet until spring.

The thing that has aged is the carton, not the tree. Cardboard in a basement softens at the corners and takes on a smell after a few years. Ours has held together better than I expected, but the bottom edges have gone soft, and the year I slid it off the shelf a corner tore loose and left a flap hanging. Tape fixed it. If I were starting over I would set the box on a pallet so it is not sitting directly on the concrete, or find a rigid bag that fits it. That is a small thing, but it is the honest answer to what four seasons did.

Who This Is For

This tree suits someone who wants the front window lit without spending an afternoon on light strings. If you decorate your own house, add a piece or two a year, and want the living room to feel warm from the weekend after Thanksgiving to the first weekend of January, this does that job. It also suits anyone with ornaments they actually care about, because there is room to set a heavy piece down into the branches rather than hang it off the end of a tip.

It suits a room with a corner wide enough for 54 inches of tree, and a shelf or a garage corner for a large carton. And it suits someone who would rather spend forty minutes shaping branches once a year than two hours fighting a light string and then hunting for the one dead bulb that took the whole strand down.

It also suits a house with one tree in it. This is not a second tree for a hallway or a landing. At 54 inches across it wants a real corner, and it wants to be the tree people see.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you want coloured lights, or if you like to change the light colour from year to year. There is no switching here. Skip it if your space is tight, because 54 inches across is a real footprint and a narrow room will feel it every time you walk past. Skip it if forty minutes of shaping sounds like a chore you know you will not do, because with 1,450 tips the shaping is not optional, and a half shaped tree looks worse than a sparse one that was never pretending.

And skip it if there is nowhere in your house for a large carton to live for eleven months. This tree does not fold into a drawer. It is a big object that takes up storage all year and comes out for five or six weeks, and if that trade is not one you want to make, a smaller tree or the one you already own is the better answer.