Do your neighbors smoke and/or use candles?
If so I would be concerned. Any open flame near a tree that dry will ignite it into an inferno and start a hellofa fire.
Is your homeowners (renters?) insurance up to scratch for fires and water damage?
Unfortunately I live in an apartment in a city of concrete and asphalt. That’s why I give the trees away. There are replanting instructions on the tag though. Survivability of the trees does not seem to be great. One person had the tree for a couple of years, but never transplanted it out of its pot and it died. The last tree went to the guard in the building I worked in, and his hobby was gardening. He was confident the tree would thrive.
Still, I think it’s better to give the tree a chance than to kill one (even if it’s grown specifically to be cut down). I hope you’ll try a live tree. You can get them from table-sized up to about five feet.
I’m hoping to buy a house. Even though there are plenty of trees in that part of the country, I’ll plant any Christmas tree I buy.
Johnny L.A. - if the tree I replant this Christmas survives, I shall name it after you!
(If it dies, it will be known as “Firewood”).
As soon as my wife gets out the “Clue 2x4”.
Mid Janurary. But ours is fake.
We’ve left ours up until at least February, I’m pretty sure. It’s fake though, and often gets taken down in stages…first the decorations, the lights, then the limbs. I remember one year with a day or two when we just had the stand and the tree trunk section standing. But we’re weirdos.
My tree is alive & lives in a pot. It gets outdoor decorative lights sometime in the fall. Late December it gets brought indoors & decorated for the holidays. Sometime in January it gets de-decorated & brought back outside.
So on the one hand, mid-January. On the other hand - NEVER!
We go out and cut our own at a tree farm. We put it up on the Yule solctice (Dec 21st or 22nd) and take it down on Imbolic (Feb 2nd).
We always use a fake tree. It comes down in early January. I’ve seen one up (not mine) as early as October.
I was brought up to believe it’s bad luck to keep the tree up past New Year’s, so it goes on January 1, the twelve days of Christmas nothwithstanding. I don’t need any more bad luck!
When I was a kid, my family would move the tree from the living room on January 6th to the basement where it would never be taken down. They wouldn’t even take off the lights. (yes, it was artificial)
Currently, my wife and I don’t put one up so we don’t have to take it down.
the tree arrives via ups from jackson and perkins around dec. 16th. just take the tree out of the box and plug in the lights. the decorations last till jan. 19th. then i try to carefully tend the tree. this year the tree made it to memorial day. then within two weeks it died. very, very, sad.
My totally insane ex-sister-in-law once left the Christmas tree up until mid-July. Partly because she was too lazy and partly because, well, she was just bonkers.
I take ours down a couple of days after Christmas.
Once, we kept a fold out tissue paper tree in our kitchen for over three years before we moved it noticed it. It’s still there.
That’s not really a tree, more of a decoration.
“Johnny the Tree”. I like that. It has a nice ring to it.
My junior year of high school, I stayed home from school the day before my birthday to take down the tree 'cause I had friends coming over. My birthday is May 1.
Now that I’m married, usually by Jan. 15.
Well, our tree is about thirty years old. Yep, it’s fake and its seen better days–the last few Christmases I was sure it had breathed its last, but it’s hanging in there. I would normally put it up on Christmas Eve (or maybe the day before) and take it down on Jan 6th, but the kids adore the thing and beg for it from the beginning of November, so it usually goes up the Saturday after thanksgiving.
And we’ve got some lights still up, but hey, we don’t plug them in or anything.
We get ours the day after, or the weekend before Thanksgiving. So we get rid of it the weekend after New Year’s Eve.