Fake here. Prelit as well, although I do put a couple of separate strings on so I can plug my “light and motion” Startrek ornaments into it. It actually looks very realistic. I just can’t see killing a perfectly healthy organism for no good reason. It seems wrong somehow.
I have to admit to thinking that pre-lit trees are “cheating,” but I couldn’t really tell you why I feel that way.
Fake. All the way.
I know I’ll probably get yelled at for this, but I can’t stand the smell of pine. Might as well put dog poop in the living room if I wanted my house to smell that bad.
I had a well-meaning friend give me a pine scented candle a few years back. She told me it was because I had a fake tree and she wanted me to have the smell of a real one. I didn’t have the heart to tell her why I used a fake tree.
A few years back, Hal and I went out and bought ourselves a beautiful 6 foot pre-lit tree for $450 - I can’t imagine having any other tree but this one!
Hal had a weird tradition growing up that he wants to continue with our family (when we have one). He never experienced decorating a tree - Santa brought the tree with him! :eek: I told him that would NEVER happen in my house! Can you imagine trying to put up a tree and decorating it while the kids are sleeping? No thank you! Besides, that was one of my fondest memories as a kid - putting up the tree and helping dad decorate it (of course, we always got yelled at for not doing it right, but that’s not the point 
).
Real tree. Root ball and all so we can plant it on the first warm day after the new year. These days I can’t cotton to killing a tree when the live option only costs about $15-20 more and enhances the beauty of my neighborhood.
Well, last year was the first time since I moved out on my own that I bothered with a Christmas Tree. My mom is a huge fan of real trees, so I adopted my grandmothers fake tree, since she lives with mom now.
Hoo boy, they dont make them like they used to.
Now they make them WITHOUT metal shards and wood splinters attacking you the blessed time you’re trying to assemble what eventually resembled a stick with furry arms getting blown away by the wind.
When I finally admitted to the rest of the household that the tree just wasn’t what it used to be anymore, I schlepped to Walmart and picked up a very nice 5’ fake tree for like 30 bucks.
If I owned a house (we’re in an apt), I would absolutely try out the real tree with the bulb so that I can plant it after Christmas… but I just don’t like the idea of cutting down a perfectly healthy tree only to put it in my house and risk blowing up my whole family by early January.
The kid is lucky I don’t put up a goddamn potted cactus with lights on it. smirk
I grew up with the Ogawful silver tree. My parents finally upgrade to a fake green one.
When I finally got out on my own, I bought a real Christmas tree only to find out I was allergic. Not only to it, but to anything cedar, pine or grass.
Yep…I am back to the fake green trees only because I can not breath around a real one.
Count me sad during the holiday.
I grew up with a fake tree – the fakest possible fake tree, an aluminum one with white flocking. In San Diego. My Dad was (still is) a bit fixated on fire safety and my Mom likes to put the tree up the first weekend in December and keep it up until New Years Day. Dad never felt comfortable with the trees off of lots because he didn’t know exactly when they’d been cut. So they compromised on a fake tree. And, since fake trees in those days (the mid-60s to the mid-70s) were not so realistic as the ones out today, they decided if it was gonna look fake, it may as well look really fake… We all thought it was pretty, though – it was our Christmas tree. When we left San Diego, we moved to rural Northern California where we could easily cut our own tree and Mom and Dad switched to real trees. But, because of my early conditioning, I have no prejudice agaisnt fake ones.
Now, my husband has always insisted on a real tree – which is what they always had when he was growing up in Wisconsin. When we lived in San Diego, we always went to a tree farm in Poway and cut our own, but since we’ve been back in Virginia, we haven’t found a cut-your-own place at a convenient distance with the kind of trees we like. So we had to switch back to lot trees. The year before last our lot tree started drying out days before Christmas – I think they must have cut that sucker in August or something. I had to take it down the day after Christmas. Because of that, my husband finally let me get a fake tree last year. I love it – it’s less trouble, less mess and eliminates the one part of putting up the Christmas tree I always hated – stringing the lights. 2 years ago, my folks moved out here – they now live 2 miles away from me – and also had to abandon their habit of cutting-their-own. So they bought a fake tree too – they couldn’t find a flocked one, though.
Since everybody here seems unanimous that those '60s incredibly-fake-looking silver/aluminum/flocked trees are AWFUL…
if anybody has one they want to get rid of, I have a loving home waiting for it. Especially if it’s silver.
Well…
I do love the smell and feel of a real tree, but…
I do also feel wierd about watching the thing die, but…
I never could bring myself to get a ‘fake’ tree, but…
We have a sunken living room now with a huge window that dwarfs mere mortal trees. Last year we spend waaaay too much on a big real tree (even at a discount) to try to fill the space. The thought of shelling out over $100 a year - Ouch.
My wife is art directing a huge X-mas party for a multi millionaire this year and was offered a $1,000.00 9’ prelit tree for pennies on the dollar since they were purchasing 5 of them for the party. I folded. It’s arriving tomorrow. I hope I won’t resent it.
I grew up with a fake tree, but once I was out of the house and married to Mr. Legend, we agreed that fake was…well, too fake. He didn’t like the idea of cutting a tree just to decorate it, though, and we didn’t have a place to plant a live tree, so we decorated a three-foot-tall Norfolk Island pine. I loved that tree, so we always had to be very careful about the decorations - nothing could be too heavy, the lights were LEDs, and we didn’t put any icicles on it because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get them back off again. People would sometimes give us normal-sized Christmas ornaments, and I’d hang them from the entertainment center or the curtains or something rather than strain the tree.
The pine tree died the year after our first child was born (I suppose I may have transferred my affections to her and neglected it, but I didn’t mean to, and I still feel guilty), so that Christmas we used a fake tabletop tree. I replaced the pine the next year, but the new one was never very robust, and it died after four or five years. After that, we stuck with the little fake tree. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, since my in-laws always had a big real tree that we all went out to cut in early December and helped to decorate. Ever since the children were born, we’ve gone up to their house on Christmas Eve, and Santa always brings the gifts there, so we reasoned that we didn’t really need a tree of our own.
After we moved into our new, larger house three years ago, my younger daughter said she really, really wanted us to have a tree of our own, so we bought a fake one. We put it up the year before last, but last year, we had a new and very active kitten in the house, so we decided not to put it up. Last year, our Christmas tree was a little colored pencil drawing of a tree that my older daughter drew on a Post-It note and stuck to the wall in the den. We’re considering putting that one back up this year, since the kitten hasn’t slowed down noticeably and he now weighs thirteen pounds.
Although I love my silver tree, I no longer have much use for it. The next time I go to my storage space I will look for it and if it is found I will happily pass on the lovlieness that is the silver aluminum tree to you, racinchikki.
I don’t know how huge your huge window is, but you can easily put a 9’ tree on a three foot (sturdy) table and have the feeling of a 12’ tree. That’s what we did in my dad’s old Victorian house (high ceilings, itty bitty rooms). The table makes a nice place under which to stash all the boxes your store your ornaments in, so you don’t have to lug 'em around more than twice. Just cover the table with a floor length tablecloth in holiday colors and you look like Martha Stewart. Bonus points if you have a train set zooming around the tree.