Leto

So who does this? Who brings in a freshly cut coniferous tree, and sets it up inside their house to adorn with pretty ornaments and ribbons and strands of lights???

I just put our 6ft $30 spruce sapling in our living room and will start decorating it today. Yet I always shake my head at the absurdity of it all. I know that the tradition started in Europe in the 1800's (I think it was German/Victorian British and started with evergreen boughs) and got transported to North America by Hessian (German) mercenaries in Quebec, but I still wonder why we continue with this tradition.

Who on TFP does this? Does any non-Christian take part in this? I have a muslim friend at work who loves to put up a tree.

Soon mine will be decorated, and presents will accumulate under it. I'll see if I can post a pic.





(30 in 30 #3)

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amonkie

In my family, I have only had a fresh christmas tree once in all the years we have had a tree. However.... my mom is a bit of a freak of nature. Her favorite holiday time is the Christmas season, and over the years a bit of an obsession with christmas trees has developed.

She currently has upwards of 30 (yes, 30!!) artificial christmas trees up and completely decorated around our house. 4-6 of these trees are under 2-3 ft tall, and the rest of them are 4+ feet or higher.

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Lucifer

Good Post topic!

our building has a 'no live tree' policy, so we went out for a drive the other day, stopped in the country and found a windfall birch branch on the side of the road. We brought it home, set it up, and have started to decorate it. Total cost = $0!!!



Personally, I love our 'Charlie Brown' tree. We are Charlie Brown kind of people.

I shake my head at the people who are supposedly living a 'green' lifestyle, recycling their eyeballs out, but support an industry which cuts down a perfectly good, oxygen producing, live tree, so they can stick it in their living room for 2 weeks after which they toss it out on the curb to be turned into landfill.

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Grasshopper Green

Lucifer, I love your tree.

I have a fake tree and prefer fake ones to real ones. Real ones smell better, but they also shed needles and make going barefoot in the living room a hazard to my foot's health. They're just too much of a hassle. Sadly, my current tree is on its last legs, I think it'll be retired after this year.

As far as decorating, I enjoy doing themed trees - last year I did silver and lavender, this year is burgundy, gold, and forest green. I have a large assortment of ornaments, so I'm usually able to use what I have to decorate. I will buy "picks" at the craft store to incorporate into my theme. The good thing about the picks is I also use them to decorate gifts, so they'll get used up the following year.

I love Christmas. We didn't celebrate when I was young, so I really get into it now. Christmas is the one time a year I lament not having a yard because I'd love to put lights in my trees and on my house. And in answer to the OP - I don't identify with any religion. To me, Christmas is a time to celebrate family.

Here is my tree this year, lit and unlit, and last years tree:

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mixedmedia

We do a real tree every year and have so for every Christmas that I can remember. I don't care for fake trees. I don't consider myself a 'green' person so much. I'm not reckless, I do recycle, but I'm not fanatical about it, either. As a consumer, I'm pretty much an underachiever, period.
I don't fret too much about the Christmas trees because they are farmed. Trees are cut down and new ones are planted every year...it isn't any more destructive than any other non-essential crop we grow. And we grow plenty.

This is our tree this year with the booblehead.

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snowy

I live in an area with a LOT of tree farms. Oregon leads the nation in Christmas tree production (Go Oregon!). Tree farming is a sustainable industry, and supporting it by buying a fresh tree keeps money in my local economy, too. My husband and I have seriously discussed the prospect of owning a tree farm at sometime in our lives. The garbage company has a deal where after Christmas, you put your tree out on the sidewalk on a given day and they come pick it up to make it into mulch.

Given where we live, we could do the whole U-Cut thing, but we don't because my husband's former Boy Scout troop sells trees at a tree lot near our house. It's the troop's big fundraiser for the year, and any tips the kids earn go towards having spending money for a ski trip they all take every winter (my husband asks every year: Are you still doing the ski trip? and then slips them some money). We go down there a few weeks before Christmas. We generally buy a Noble fir, because its limbs are strong enough to hold up all of my heavy ornaments. We have a lot of ornaments.

Here are some pictures of our tree:





We got LED lights for the tree this year after our big strand of regular lights finally died on us. I'm getting used to them still.

I couldn't not have a Christmas tree. It went up Dec. 5th and that felt late to me. My tree will be up until Jan. 6th (Twelfth Night) and hit the curb Jan. 7th.

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mixedmedia

they do the tree recycling thing down here, too.

your house looks very interesting, snowy.

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Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

snowy

Thanks, mixed. It was built in 1929 and is a lath and plaster house built by a European builder. You can't see it well in those pictures, but there are dried flowers pressed into the plaster of the living room walls, the wood floors are random-width, and the nails in the floor were handmade. It's funky and we love it.

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Willravel

I've had the same fake tree for like 20 years. Every year after Christmas, I pack it with those Christmas-smelling pine cones so it smells like a real tree. It's 100% recyclable. And it's wonderful.

Maybe some day I'll grow a Douglas fir in the front yard and decorate it.

mixedmedia

Well, it certainly looks lovable.
I like funky, old houses, too.

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Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

uncle phil

although i grew up with all the hoopla surrounding indoor trees decorated with lights, icicles, popcorn strings, etc., i'm not really keen on putting up a dead tree inside my house. (oh, and dad and i cut and sold trees off our farm for years, so i'm not unaware of the ecological or economical aspects of the holiday season...) when we spent christmas up north, aunt phil and i would go out around thanksgiving time and identify a tree we wanted, then go out around my birthday and cut it, add legs to it, stand it up on the outside deck, and put lights on it. i've always thought that christmas time doesn't need to be advertised more than a couple of weeks in advance.

on new years day, the tree would come down and either be cut up for the woodstove or added to the bonfire pile out back. nothing against our orthodox friends, but three weeks is long enough for us to celebrate anything.

now that we escape the snow in florida, aunt phil puts lights around and through the two palm trees we have in our front yard, usually around my birthday but sometimes earlier. that's the extent of our "christmas tree" tradition now...

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Daniel_

We have an 8 foot synthetic, pre-lit tree that my wife and daughter chose 6 years ago, and they decorate at the start of December. It comes down soon after the day itself.

I like the way it looks, but if it wasn't for the girls liking it, I'd not bother.

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TheCrimsonGhost

In defense of those people... the trees were planted and grown specifically for this purpose, and if it weren't such a big tradition, all those trees most likely would not have existed. It's not like they go out into the forest and start cutting down trees... Christmas trees are grown in a farm like setting. Planted, grown, cut down and sold, and the process starts again. Mother nature aids in the growth, but these trees were not planted by the wind or birds, someones hands stuck them in the ground or pot, and they simply wouldn't have been there if not for this silly tradition. So I beg to differ on that last point you made.

P.S. When we were kids, my dad cut the tree up and burnt it in the fire place. What I think should be worried about more than all the trees going to the landfill, that will actually benefit it with natural processes that help break down garbage, is all the wasted wrapping paper and cardboard boxes that have no other place to end up but in the landfill, and being coated with plastic a lot of the time, take a lot longer to decompose than a tree.

Charlatan

We live in a part of the world where very few coniferous trees grow (and the ones that do, aren't Christmas trees).

I am not a Christian but have put up a tree every year. I view it as a mid-winter thing, my wife sees it as a Christian thing. In Canada, we would do the cut your own tree thing. Here, we have done the fake tree thing until this year. This year we forked out the money for a real tree. Ikea ships a container or two of real trees here from Oregon every year. This year we had a huge Thanksmas party and decided it would be nice for our Canadian friends to have a real tree.

Ikea will recycle the tree into wood chips. That said, we could just as easily throw it into the jungle behind our house. It would be gone in 6 months. The jungle eats everything at an accelerated pace.

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BadNick

I have no memory of any year that I didn't have a fresh cut Christmas tree in the house. So over the years that amounts to a small forest of trees that I've had. As suggested by TheCrimsonGhost above, they were all grown for this purpose on local tree farms and I'm glad to bolster that economy a little bit. As a child I was raised Catholic so of course we had trees; but then as I got older and turned "non religious" I continued with the Christmas trees since I like how they look and to me they symbolize seasonal changes and good will between people.

My first Jewish wife, now my ex-wife, never had a Christmas tree while growing up since her family practiced a liberal form of their religion, but they were religious. So she was ecstatic when we got married and started having Christmas trees every year. She really got into it and had a wonderful sense of style and decoration that made it quite beautiful.

My second Jewish wife, who is my present dearest wifey, comes from a non-religious family background so they had Christmas trees in the home as she was growing up and practiced some of the non-religious traditions of the season. So obviously we've always had a tree since we've been married.

jewels

Not of the Christian faith and although my parents never put up a tree, we used to spend the holidays with many of our Christian friends. As an adult, I've always had some sort of tree every year.

We used to get one every year until we discovered that one of the girls has a severe allergy to either the sap or the scent of the leaves. We'd had a beautiful artificial tree and ornaments but had to leave it behind for this last move. My absolutely amazing (the 18 y/o) daughter bought us a 3-1/2 foot pre-lit with her first paycheck, so we still haven't missed a year.

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Jinn

Proud Atheist, and also proudly decorate my fake tree.. it's not a Christian thing at all, it was proudly stolen from the pagans. Ours is a fancy fake one, with fiber optics in the needles and a color wheel in the base, so it twinkles multi-colored without installing any actual lights. Good suggestion from Will on the air freshener, I'm definitely doing that after we put it away in 2011.

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Fremen

I'm a big procrastinator from a long line of procrastinators, so we'd still have our tree up in March, sometimes.

It got to be a hassle to do the whole process of putting it up and taking it down every year, when none of my relatives visit my house for the holidays. We always go to my brother's and sister's houses, and we enjoy their trees.

We did buy one of those fiber-optic 3 ft. trees one year, which was pretty, but the next year we discovered we had mice that also liked it.

Now we just enjoy Christmas trees vicariously.

/still thinking about buying one for next year.
//it would be a fake tree if we did

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BadNick

Along the procrastinating theme, I'm pretty bad, too. So I've thought about getting a nice little Norfolk pine since they look appropriate for Christmas, they're cute, and I have decent luck growing them. Then I can put a couple decorations on it for Christmas and just leave it there forever. Sometimes the perfect procrastination requires advanced planning. Maybe I'll do this next year. Look how nice this look:

thedoc

We bought a live tree this year the goal is to plant it on the property so it will continue to do what it does naturaly. We aren't always successful but we try (sometimes they die after planting). At my parents old house there is a forest of old pine trees that once were our Christmas trees. Some of them lived, lucky us.

bobby

my house is small and after the 2 kids moved out we stopped having an inside tree...my oldest daughter had given us her first tree ( a small potted one)...I planted it in the front yard out side our living room window...it grew up and has been our Christmas tree ever since....





xoxoxoo

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Lucifer

bobby doesn't know how to post a picture in TFP???????????????

WTF?

It's the end of the world as we know it!

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Latex Ren

My people don't do xmas trees
I love pine trees and the thought of chopping one down breaks my heart.
My dogs would eat the tree.

ring

I stopped by the local tree lot the other day,
& they gladly let me gather some pine cuttings.
I break them up into pieces that fit inside an old large stew pot & simmer them.

This is this year's tree:

bagatelle

It's traditional here (in Finland) to put up the tree at Christmas Eve, sometimes few days earlier, like us today, when the carpets were off the floor while cleaning. Didn't decorate it completely yet.

We have small piece of forest, where we can get our own pine tree. It hasn't been many times, we didn't get a tree. Afterwards it gets sawed and burned in the boiler room.

I like getting rid of it rather soon, especially if the needles (?) start falling off a lot. The usual day to undress it would be on Epiphany, January 6th. It's not much of a religious habit, just a good day to end Christmas.

This year I haven't had much interest in putting up decorations or lights, we have been renovating a bit at home.

Fire

I just bought a MUCH bigger house (for less money, Thank you real estate crash) in the fall, so we with a 6 and a half foot artificial tree, up from the old 4.5 footer this year- It seemed big, until we got it to the dining room, we want around an 8 footer for next year..... artificial, cause we dont have to contend with the needles that way, though a live tree would not go to waste either.... We do a lot of wood carving, and assorted crafts...

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Lucifer

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I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
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counterpoint

I absolutely love that tree, Lucifer! It's dead, but it looks so cute, especially with the ornaments -- it fits the design of your living room, too.

We personally buy a tree, but don't toss it to the side of the road after Christmas. We use the tree for firewood, to prevent it from going to waste. By the time we take it down, it's turning brown anyway, and it's frigid outside, so it's a win-win situation.