too soon for christmas tree?

When I was in the early stages of dating my wife she had warned me that she loves Christmas and goes nuts decorating. I sort of forgot that she told me that when I got to her place around midnight after work one night the first week of December. It was like the cast of Elf had exploded in her townhouse, the place was completely over the top but still tasteful (if that makes sense).

I soon learned that she came by it honestly as her divorced Dad and his super awesome new wife who lived in Central Florida were also completely over the top. Full lights in the palm trees, 6 trees in the house, decorations everywhere. They would start bringing stuff from their storage unit before Thanksgiving and take a couple weeks to decorate. It was always completely insane but also awesome.

Sadly his wife, my stepmother in law, died a couple years later after going from Cancer diagnosis to death in less than a year. We thought he may scale back the decorating but he has not. He bought a lot of new stuff and the various "Debbie" Christmas trees were sent to England, Michigan, California, and one home with us to Western Canada.

The tree we have from her has two small trunks of decorations that are seashells and starfish and other beach stuff on red ribbons that Debbie had put together by hand. We always get sad putting it up but feel like we have a bit of her with us.

The total tree tally for our house is 3 big ones - shell tree upstairs family room, real tree in the living room, artificial tree in the basement and then each bedroom has a little tree as well. We are starting the process of building a new house and when we go through showhomes we always imagine where we will put the shell tree.

Never too early to decorate in our house.

 

Not too many, no. And a palm doesn't quite cut it as a Christmas tree.

I lived in Eugene, Oregon before Phoenix, and that's where a a huge percentage of the real trees around here were grown. Trees I could buy for $5 or $10 dollars in Eugene sell for $100 in Phoenix -- and they're dead.

 

What a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing.

 

Ours goes up today (always the Sunday after Thanksgiving). After church I'll get the stuff out down from upstairs and start on the outside lights - the 'redneck lights' as my wife calls them - while Mrs. Joe puts up the indoor decorations. After that, I put up the tree and string the lights. I leave the ornaments to her because wherever I put one, she'd move it, anyway!

We usually take it all down the 27-28. There is no firm date for that, but it usually is prior to New Years; New Year's Day at the latest if something has prevented us from doing it beforehand. There was one year when I was single I was taking my stuff down mid afternoon on Dec. 25. A buddy drops by and asks, "Are you just now putting up your Christmas tree?" to which I said, "Up? Christmas is over. I'm taking it down."

 

Growing up, our tree went up no sooner than 10 days before Christmas and came down after Ephiphany (January 6th). It was considered very bad luck to take your tree down before New Year's Day. We don't have room for a tree in our place but when we DO have a bigger place it'll be real or GTFO.

 

If I had my way Mrs. Huggy and Huggy Jr. would put our tree (artificial, never had a real tree as I am allergic to them) up on Dec. 24 and it would come down on Boxing Day. But since I never get my way I am sure they will put it up on Dec. 8 or 15, will come down early in 2013.

The Newfie next door to me goes full-out Griswold on Christmas. He has had his tree up for at least two weeks, has a huge Santa/sleigh thing on his roof (almost blew off during some crazy winds we had a week or so ago) and his front lawn is decorated with music, lights etc.

A former co-worker was a Christmas junkie, always put her tree up on Nov. 1.

 

Done.
Although, part of my outside lights that started out working have now decided they'd rather not. I'll have to figure that out tomorrow.

 

We always do ours the Friday after Thanksgiving unless I'm traveling. We just have a tree and some decorations in the living room with a few decorations in the kitchen sinc we host Mrs. Fear's family.

 

Rule of thumb: No home tree should be up before the lighting of the Rockefeller Center tree.

 

Why not?

We always had a fake tree growing up. The first time we ever had a real tree, I think I was in high school or something. My mom came home and said something like "Look what I found!" and hauled out a real tree. She'd been driving near the softball fields and it fell off the car in front of her.

These days, I have no tree myself -- I'm essentially homeless, so this works out well -- and if my parents have one, it's for the grandkids' benefit. If this is the case, my mom just uses it as an excuse to hack down one of the zillions of trees my father has put up on their property.

 

We put up a tree in the hangar on Thanksgiving day. I'm sure it'll go down around NYE.