>Well, you might as well get used to it. With cut trees on sale already it is amazing how many people will put up a cut tree now and expect it to stay moist and safe til Christmas. No amount of water and sugar or any other ingredients can ensure it will not be a fire hazard. Too many fires will occur. When we put up a cut tree it was always two days before christmas and we cut it ourselves. We left it up one week. In later years we switched to live trees in pots that you replanted afterwards. Now I put up a fake tree every year instead.

Since we didn't do Christmases (just went to two lunches :), we did New Years - with the tree (a spruce) and the Granpa Frost (because everyone there knew who St Nikola is and that his day was almost three weeks before, and that he was the protector of travelers and seamen, completely unrelated to Christmas). And I'd get a tree on the market, on 30th or 31st of December, coming home from work, tie it to the bicycle and take it home so. People tend to do things at the last minute there, so it never happened that I couldn't find one, there were always many who'd come shopping by the time ours was already up and flashing.

Having come here, we did buy a tree once - after Christmas, of course, but the lady still insisted on wrapping the pot in that particular shade of red foil, to make it "more Christmassy". We kept it for as long as it would survive in the pot. Luckily, the whole thing is over, I don't have to do any of that anymore, kids have grown out of it :).