Just a question, Johnny…do you have a girlfriend or wife? If so, do you ever give her flowers? Well, while terribly romantic, you are in-fact KILLING THEM!
Also. I know several people who have fireplaces and use their tree for fire wood after Christmas. Not to mention, lots of people have wood chipping machines, and will find a “practical use” for their tree after the season.
Me, I go with the artifical tree…not because of global warming, but because I am very lazy about keeping it watered!!!
Sassy, there are incosistencies and contradictions in every belief system. I choose to buy living xmas trees, and I encourage other people to do the same; but I’m not going to get upset if people want to use cut trees.
FTR: I do not have a girlfriend, but when I did I gave her things more permanent than flowers.
We had an artificial tree when I was a kid, so I think we used to put it up much earlier than we do now, probably around the first weekend in December.
Now we get our tree after I come home for the semester, because my mom knows that I love going with everyone to help pick one out. Also she wants to make sure that the tree is really fresh. I think in the past few years we’ve gotten our tree between the 15th and 20th of December, and it stays up until January 6.
One of my friends told me that her mother puts up their tree (artificial) around Halloween. If that’s what they like then that’s what they should do, but I think I’d be sick of the decorations by Christmas. Kind of like when the local Wal-Mart puts the Christmas displays up at the end of August.
This does not apply to “living” trees or the trees you cut yourself, but:
Just FTR, if you buy an already-cut tree from a lot, you are better off getting it early and getting it in the water at home. Most of those trees are cut at the same time, so waiting till right before Christmas, to get a “fresher” one isn’t necessarily best. They get watered a little on the lot (if at all).
Your best bet is to go ahead and get your tree, take it home and cut off about 2 inches from the bottom, get it in the stand with lots of water and keep it watered.
If you go to a lot the week before Christmas, in the hopes that you will get a tree that has just been cut, you are wrong. The trees have most likely been sitting there or on a truck for a couple weeks and are drier and therefore more of a fire hazard.
*Complete hijack, inspired by SassyKYredhead and JohnnyLA: *
I went to college with a girl who was a vegetarian on the grounds that she didn’t want “any living thing to die” just so she could eat. She was very emphatic that "no living thing" (thing, not creature) should die for her. I always wondered how she justified killing all those innocent vegetables and fruits.
First of all, as most of you know, Christmas trees are grown as a crop. It’s not like someone is clear-cutting a mountainside in Nova Scotia for your Douglas fir. It takes about five to seven years to grow a typical Christmas tree. More if you are getting one of the 12’ trees or something, but I’m talking the typical 5-8’ tree. In this time, the tree is producing a large amount of oxygen due to its rapid growth and is providing a habitat for wildlife. Heck, at my company (landscaping), we can’t have a bunch of balled and burlaped trees sitting around for a week before birds nest in them, rabbits hop around them and it generally looks like Wild Kingdom in the nursery. I can only imagine what square miles of Christmas tree farm looks like. Yes, the trees get cut down, but not all at one time and habitat is maintained.
The other big issue is cost. There’s a reason why a five foot white pine in the Christmas tree lot costs $40.00 and a five foot white pine at the landscape nursery costs $110.00. Because Christmas trees are considered a “crop”, they get all sorts of benefits from the government that landscape growers don’t get (the Dept. of Agriculture counts landscape plants and crop plants as seperate things, regardless of whether or not you’re discussing the exact same genus and specie of plant). If you want to start a farm in Illinois, you can buy evergreen saplings at the price of 15 cents each. Mind you, they have to be used for Christmas trees and if you sell one as a live tree the DoA can fine you, and the tree purchaser, $5000 each for each tree sold. To buy saplings for a nursery, you don’t get the benefit of purchasing them through the state and each one will run you several bucks. In other words, it’s not economically fesible for everyone to buy a live tree, nor for places to try to grow and sell them. And of course, not everyone has a place to plant a live tree so either they buy artifical or cut. If you disallow cut trees, you lose the benefits listed in the first paragraph.
Finally, the survival rate of live Christmas trees is dismal. If you live in a northern climate, you need to have your conifers in the ground well before Christmas. Once the soil freezes, the tree can not put out roots into the soil, nor will it do so while it is dormant in the cold. However, since it doesn’t lose its leaves (needles), the wind continues to blow over the leaf surfaces, pulling out water and dehydrating the tree. I’m not saying it’s impossible to do (with lots of water, anti-dessicants and care) but if the rate was above 25% survival, I’d be amazed. Paying out over a hundred dollars for a 5’ Christmas tree that will lead to having to dig a hole in the frozen earth and then removing a dead 5’ tree from the backyard doesn’t sound like a great deal of fun to me
Oh, and I’ll probably be getting my tree next weekend. I usually get a fraiser fir. Excellent needle retention and I like the shape of them. Easily my favorite Christmas tree.
My kids and I cut down that white pine yesterday. About 7 feet tall, and $22. here in Akron, OH. The same place we have cut for 4 years. That same tree the last few years has been $30-35. And my ex-SO experienced a similar price drop at the place where she got hers.
sassyKYredhead – do I think it’s wrong to bake a ham or turkey? No, I don’t. You eat them. How many times have you eaten a Christmas tree? NEVER?! Gee! So, it’s something you do not “need” in any way, shape, or form but you feel a media-market driven “false need” to have one? How very sad for you! Does it hurt to have your mind so controlled by others?
And if “killing hay” is your “deep” mind altering equivalent to killing a tree than thank you for caring but fuck you for sharing. That has to be the most moronic equivalent I’ve ever seen posted. Truly, I get the point but I feel you could have found a much more analogous comparison. I have to give you ten points for “pulling something out of your ass”; perhaps next time it will be your head.
Johnny L.A. – Okay, that’s it, I want to have your baby. Or at least go through the baby making motions again and again and again and again and… Sigh…
Those small trees cut for home use don’t really bother me, but those large trees that cities cut down to decorate their downtown (Fort Worth, TX in my case) really bothers me. That tree has to be 50-100 years old or older (I don’t know trees), and they cut it down to stick it in the middle of a street so it’d look pretty.
Oh, and I don’t put up any Christmas decorations. I gave my tree to Goodwill this year.
We usually get ours sometime in the week and a half before Christmas, whenever we get a chance to pick one out. This year, however, my mom decided to just bringone home yesterday. It actually made me sad…it’s just not the same when you don’t get to help choose the perfect one. I did get to put the lights on though…that made me happy.
And tonight, I’m sleeping on the couch…nothing more peaceful than glowing lights at Christmas.
-what’s the record for keeping a tree up? I used to live in Pasadena, CA, and the house next door to us kept theirs up untill Feb. 1st! I really like the color and warmth that the tree adds to a house, especially in the bleak, dark, long weeks AFTER New Years! So I say to you all, who keeps yopur tree up the longest?
PS-I recall seein one tree up (and lit) untill St. patrick’s Day! (March)
