Real tree or not, does it depend on your childhood?

We've had fake trees over the years for practical reasons but I really don't like them.

DD has a wooden one - it's very different but looks very effective.

Always had real and as a child we had real candles too , they came from Germany as did the candle holders which clipped on to the branches. The final year of the real candies was the year a candle fell into a box of wrapping paper and Mum just grabbed it and put it out with her bare hands. Poor thing, both hands were dreadfully blistered and given that Dad was a total klutz in the kitchen and I was still small, I have no idea how she got through Christmas Day.
H&S would have had a fit (good thing Grandad is not still here!)
The first year they were married nobody in their little Scottish town had a Christmas tree and they crept out late on night armed with a trusty chopper and “liberated” one from a nearby estate. ??
In years to come they became close friends with the factor (manager?) of that estate and a tree was delivered with his compliments every December.

There were no such thing as fake trees when I grew up nor was there fake candles just the real thing in little metal clips
I can’t afford a real tree now or the practicalities (no car) so I use the one I ve had for years still looks nice though One of my children always gets a real one but the other two have fake

I don’t think it’s anything to do with what you had as a child but what practicalities allow

We always had an artificial tree, a small one, and I didn’t know
Anyone who had a real one.They were certainly around in the
40’s and 50’s and possibly much earlier than that.
To have a real tree would mean you either lived closeby where fir trees grew and could fell and drag one home, or you were middle class and had a car and a Father who was willing to drive somewhere to buy one and put it on the roof rack.
Only one person in our street had a car ( a black morris minor) and he was much looked up to.?
When married we bought real ones ( because we had a car!)
And that continued until the children grew up, left home and married, after that, we were happy to dispense with pulling needles out of our feet and the cat’s paws and bought artificial
Ones ever since.

I have a lovely photograph of my two year old self standing on a chair next to the artificial Christmas tree. This was in 1945. I doubt the tree was new then, so artificial trees have been around for many years. My mother used the same tree for the rest of her life. After my marriage we had a real tree. These days the tree is artificial. So no, I don't think childhood trees influenced me one way or the other. My adult children have always had a real tree though.

BlueBelle fake news! ?there were fake trees around, you probably just didn’t see or notice them.

They were certainly around in the 40’s and 50’s and possibly much earlier than that.

In England yes, lemongrove but in Scotland Christmas Day was not even a public holiday in my childhood and a tree was regarded as foreign - even Germanic . This was 1947.

Ah, Scotland......a strange country with different customs nae doot! ?

Indeed Lemongrove
From The Scotsman

A 1640 Act of the Parliament of Scotland made the celebration of “Yule vacations” illegal. England, under Oliver Cromwell, also imposed a ban on Christmas at around the same time. Despite the repealing of the Act in 1686, the suppression of Christmas in Scotland effectively lasted for 400 years, with December 25 only becoming a public holiday in 1958. Boxing Day was not recognised as a festive holiday until 1974 . Concrete information on how this state of affairs lasted so long is scant, but it’s clear that the pre-existing emphasis on Hogmanay, coupled with the Presbytarian Church of Scotland’s indifference towards Christmas (even when the Victorians were actively reviving the holiday from its post-Puritan slumber) led most Scots to accept a long-standing status quo

Oliver Cromwell was a real killjoy

Artificial when growing up. I remember dressing the tree with strips of tinsel. In think it is called lametta. We have to collect it all in to use again next year.

Real when I had my own family. I love handmade tree decorations and between us we buy or make one or two every Christmas.

I've turned some this year to send to my daughter and granddaughter.

I got married at the end of September and ended up in the hospital high dependancy unit in November, where I spent six weeks very ill.
I was only allowed home on Christmas Eve, after sobbing my eyes out and begging my consultant to let me out. I was so excited to be home until I saw the bare 7ft real tree lying across the floor of our living room, with no pot to put it in and no decorations to be seen anywhere. ?

I had lain in hospital, dreaming of our first magical Christmas together as a married couple and the perfectly decorated real tree.
We always had an artificial one when I was young, and my mother never made a big thing about Christmas, so you can imagine my disappointment at the sight in front of me.

Poor DH had been working, attending uni at night and running backwards and forwards to the hospital some distance away, that he hardly had time to draw breath.
There was even worse to come in the kitchen, but that's another tale. ?

I grew up in a rather large house and we had 3 or 4 real trees. The one in the entrance hall was about 18ft. Absolutely beautiful.

I now have 3 real Christmas trees and 1 artificial

Well I don't have the real ones up yet. Usually wait until about the 15th. Can't be doing with droopy trees

Our trees are filled with decorations from relatives dating back 100 years or so. Also children's offerings are still displayed. There is the most hideous reindeer I made when I was about 8.

We buy some decorations every year. All colours and shapes.

Our trees are riotously chaotic.

And I love them

We’d an artificial tree as I was growing up - I think they were seen as more modern back in the 60s and 70s. We’ve always had a real one though, usually way too big for the house and a bit of a health and safety hazard to manoeuvre round. I did buy real candles and holders when we lived in Germany, but was never brave (or foolhardy) enough to light them.

Ours is up already this year. Full two weeks earlier than usual, but I felt in need of a bit of festive cheer. I just hope it lasts till Twelfth Night.

I’m pretty sure my mum used to buy our tree from the greengrocer and he would deliver it on his truck.

I do have two artificial trees, so I can put one up in the dining room. I go for the opposite of a realistic one, if it’s going to be artificial, I want it to look artificial! One of them is a pre-lit spiral of tinsel-covered metal. It takes 30 seconds to put up and another 30 seconds to find the socket to plug it in and switch on. It folds flat after Xmas, taking up almost no space.

Maw I remember my dad working on Christmas dayit was just normal to us .Christmas dinner was when he came home .Hogmanay was a different story,a frenzy of cleaning and a hot meal on the table for midnight .I never felt like a heathen because we didn't make a fuss at Christmas ,everyone else around us was the same.My Welsh Auntie used to try to force my uncle to take the day off work ,she never succeeded.Sometimes I think we had it right and all the commercialisation isn't needed or wanted by many .We just go along with it because its expected .

My father was an ambulance man but always managed to have Christmas Day off because most of his colleagues wanted Hogmanay and New Year's Day off.
He used to have to walk to work, as there was no public transport and it was a fair distance.
They were a hardy lot 60 years ago!

Early 1950s. An artificial tree made of a thick stick of wood with stiff branches that had to be bent into shape and it stood on a circular lump of wood. Our tree lights were on a thick flex with painted pear shaped bulbs in red, green and blue. Very few ornaments although I remember a red spotted glass toadstool and a little green glass house. I've never had an artificial tree in my house ever since.

We grew up with a real tree, usually a spruce. Smelled wonderful, but awfully prickly, and we would find needles in the carpet for months! Coloured lights, and lots of tinsel (we called them icicles). I still have a few of the coloured glass baubles handed down from the 60's.

Meeting my DH, they always had an artificial tree. I put up with it for a few years but finally convinced him to go with real when we had children. We still get a real tree, usually a fir. So pretty. They are not as fragrant as spruce or pine, but don't drop the needles as readily.

Mind you, I have seen some beautiful artificial trees lately; the flocked ones (with fake snow on the tips) really appeal to me. Never say never.

As a child always real. Those trees with their glorious pine smell are absolutely imprinted on my memory.

As a young mum at home with the children I wanted to repeat those memories for them, so the tree was always real, which we created a tradition around by going out with sandwiches and flask to buy one two weekends before Christmas .

Then after I went back to work real was replaced with a false one as time was always at such a premium.

Now I’m back to a real tree since retirement, the difference being that they are delivered to the door.

Love them!!

What a lovely thread this is. I’ve really enjoyed reading all your posts and feel quite nostalgic thinking back to those childhood days.

We always had a real tree although it was small enough to stand on a table in the hall and was only purchased on Christmas Eve. As a child, I loved the familiarity of the decorations which came out of their box each year.

We always started with a panic because the lights didn’t work and each bulb had to be tried until we found the broken ones.

I have never in my life seen a tree with real candles. Seems like an accident waiting to happen.?

Moving to Malta forty years ago when I married, real trees were just not available, so we bought an artificial one which lasted many years.

It is possible to find real trees now, but they are extremely expensive so I have never felt the need to buy one.

At our last house we had a lot of space and very high ceilings so DH bought a nine foot artificial tree which did look lovely.
I donated it to the cancer hospital when he died and they decorated it with all the different coloured ribbons for the different types of cancer.

I downsized to a much smaller place after he died so I bought a tree from Lidl which has to be assembled branch by branch but looks festive enough for me. ?

annesixty re: kitten and Christmas tree, many years ago we had two kittens and ended up suspending (the large) Christmas tree from a beam in the sitting room.
Every time the kittens jumped at it, it swung backwards and forwards. Both survived!

Thank you SueDonim. I had a short break and lurked for a bit ?
Animals & Christmas trees reminds me of our last dog Millie, a large galumphing beardie, who was in kennels while we were in Oz one Christmas, but stayed in the owner’s house. I had an eMail from the kennel owner to let me know how she was doing. Well behaved apart from removing every chocolate from their tree and managing to leave the foil wrappings hanging from the branches as if nothing had happened ?

Always real tree as a child - my dad was a poacher lived off the land, and used to help himself to one from Forestry Commission land nearby!

I then worked at a timber yard in the early years of my marriage and was given a free one each year but latterly I’ve bought a small artificial one which takes its place quite nicely in our sitting room.

There were definitely fake trees in the 1950s as we had one , very like the one chewbacca described - powered harps the same design? The branches were thick & stiff a big like loo brushes ;but green) and there were little candle holders on tgd ends though we never put candles on. The ornaments were always the same and I loved it at the time though looking back it was awful!
Later my parents had real trees (small ones standing on a coffee table) and we had a real tree to for years and years. A couple of years ago I got so fed up with sweeping up leaves and a gc was allergic to real trees anyway so we got a fake one which at all bad and much easier to deal with.