Have you put up a Christmas tree?🎄

No. I’m not a Christian.

No. It clashes with my Festivus Pole.

No, I hate consumerism and religion

but I smoked a few trees.

raar rar rrrrarrrr

Not enough trees to go around this year, so I'm making a book tree.

I put up a New Year tree.

Yes. I’m not usually a Christmas person, but since there nothing else to do, I did. And it turned out pretty.

As an outgrowth of my erstwhile Christian fundamentalist fanaticism, I forswore Christmas altogether for some twenty-five years. It was pagan; it was unscriptural. Ironically, as I transitioned from fundamentalist to liberal Christian, to skeptic, to atheist, and finally anti-theist, my reasons for abstaining from Christmas slowly dissolved. Across the past few years, I'd begun re-accumulating a tree and decorations - in the beginning, more because my mentally handicapped, schizophrenic younger brother missed celebrating Christmas than any attachment to the holiday myself. Now however, I'm actually finding that I enjoy having a tree up in the living room (I'm in far too poor health to be able to put up outdoor lights), and purchasing Christmas gifts for my brother and for my best friend's four year old son - my 'honorary nephew,' as it were.

So yeah - we've got a tree. Not a real one - I still object to killing an actual tree simply to celebrate a season. But it's still pretty - a four footer on a corner table, with colored led lights, a silver tinsel garland, vintage Radko Shiny Brite reflector bulbs, and a purple finial tree topper. My brother is delighted with it, and that makes me happy.

Decorating makes a mess. I don't enjoy it.

If decorating makes a mess, R9, you're doin' it wrong.

R1 Evergreen trees and lights have nothing do to with Christianity, though. They're seasonal decorations to cheer up the winter.

R1 Evergreen trees and lights have nothing do to with Christianity, though. They're seasonal decorations to cheer up the winter.

I never have a live tree, though I am sure my cats would love playing in one. I usually decorate a large silk bamboo plant as my alternative. Since I don't trust the juvenile delinquent furries with tree ornaments, we have decorations around the house and stockings on the mantle this year.

I have some Christmas lights on the porch and a wreath on the door, but not much else.

i am looking for a wreath this week.

i am looking for a wreath this week.

I stopped putting up a tree when I stopped hosting Christmas for the family. Eventually got rid of my artificial tree and don't miss it one bit. I do decorate outside and a wreath on the door, but I do nothing inside or special for Christmas day, no gifts or family or friends, just me and I am fine with that, best decision I ever made. Wish I had done it years ago, I know some people love Christmas and the get-togethers, the gifts and I am happy for them but that isn't for me. I just want to be alone.

Lazy Atheist here.

Our tree lights give us a warm soothing glow that comforts us these dark days of winter. One year we didn't get rid of it all until almost February.

No, husband was raised Jewish, so not part of his heritage and we have cats, which would make putting s tree up moot rather quickly. (I never liked artificial ones.)

No I would never go through the effort to put up a damn tree in my apartment. Why would I?

I wanted to, but I couldn't find a tree delivery and set up service in my town.

Yes. And it's gorgeous.

Why are your thumbs-up and thumbs-down emojies in different skin colors?

Of course, can’t miss the chance to put up the Christopher Radko ornaments!

Yes. I was raised Roman Catholic, but I've considered myself atheist for decades. I mainly just put it up as an FU to all the jerk parents that kick their kids out of the house for being LGBTQ.

Yes and it makes us very happy!

If you don't decorate for Christmas, you should have to work on Christmas day, you heathen.

Nah. I'm working toward functional minimalism, so I've been curating all my possessions for a couple of years.

I do have 12 or 15 lovely ornaments with special meaning to me. They are stored in a beautiful wooden box, so I placed the box on top of a chest of drawers, and then placed a small sculpture on top of the box, as if the box were a stand for it. No one can see it, but I don't have guests, anyway, and I know what is in the box and what it means to me.

Also, not a Christian or any religion, but I never tell anyone that. I have no desire to discuss my views with them or anyone, really.

I do. My ornaments are off-the-hook and in love seeing them for a couple of weeks each year! I have a really nice artificial tree! I don’t think Xmas trees have to have anything to do with religion. They don’t for me.

Scrooge here. I'm living alone for the first time in awhile, my decorations are in someone else's shed and i broke my fucking toe this morning and no one is coming to visit me at my house (and i don't want them to). i hate my job, my life and my lack of love. so nope, didn't care to put up a tree, even the fake one i had in one of the xmas totes.

I stopped putting up a tree 4 years ago and gave my artificial to one of my friends who oddly leaves it up all year (and changes the "ornaments" based of the time of year, particular holiday, etc.). He likes it and I was sick of moving furniture around to fit it every year. I say do what you want and just go with that. My house is about 1,400 sf and while I have plenty of furniture and art of different mediums (a lot of sculpture on different sized pedestals, oil paintings, matted charcoals, various art glass pieces, etc.) - my look is rather clean and modern. I always put up tons of lights (mostly warm white fairy lights with plugs) and have plenty of decorated "areas" in the house but find that decorating an actual tree really isn't necessary for me. The effect is still there.

What kind of a fucking loser doesn't put up a tree???. Nothing more beautiful in the home during winter than a well-appointed Christmas tree. And I love my cats climbing it...part of the enjoyment.

I would like to, but I don't have any good place to place one. Maybe next year. I did buy some nice ornaments this year for my loved ones, though.

I didn't get to do it for years, so now I do. It is a pagan symbol and I like the colored lights.

Of course Christmas has a quasi-religious component (although religious scholars seem to agree that December 25 is an unlikely time for Jesus’ birthday.) But at least in the states Christmas is a big, secular holiday as well. There is nothing religious about Christmas trees, Santa Claus, feasting, Frosty, the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Jingle Bells, frantic shopping, decking the halls, donning we now our gay apparel, etc. There are enough elements of Christmas to celebrate the season any way you fucking want. Cheers! I’m going a-wassailing….

And don’t get me started on Easter bunnies, baskets of treats, and egg hunts.

The real holiday is the solstice. Christmas trees are modified yule logs, and the whole holiday was created by the church, because they couldn't stop people from celebrating the solstice, so they altered the meaning of it. Can't think of a reason to let those long-dead political manipulators tell me how to live.

I have a tree but I also have some very non-traditional ornaments up on it, which are there to emphasize the pagan nature of Christmas. This Turkish fertility figurine caused quite a stir when my frau mom spotted it a few years ago.

Yes. Why? Because I celebrate Christmas.

My Jewish husband insists. I’d be happy with no tree or a tabletop one but NOOOO.

Had one and I rarely put it up, so I gave it away. Now I light a candle.

I decorate every year. I have since my first apartment 30 years ago.

Xmas celebrates the birth of Christ, a festival first celebrated 335 CE. The various Xmas symbols, whatever their origins, are an integral part of that Xtian festival/celebration. Attempting to separate/deflect from Xmas’s Xtian origins and both its historic and contemporary cultural imperative in Xtian societies is rationalization, not reality. Non-Xtian indifference/aversion to this quintessential Xtian celebration is therefore readily understandable.

Yes. Every year. Looks nice and I like the smell it brings.

Yes! I always put it up, along with decorations, the day after Thanksgiving/Black Friday. I have a huge 9 foot tall artificial tree that looks really pretty. I refuse to buy a tree that was killed for decoration.

No. My husband doesn’t want to exert himself by opening attic stairs. He rushed & rushed to get a date for a cardiac catheterization, then didn’t get it done. He just hangs around getting older & uglier.

Last fall I moved from a two bedroom apartment to a house, with two bedrooms, two baths, large kitchen, dining room, and office. I have decorated each room, far more than I have done for years. I need the anti-covid cheer. My tree is six feet tall, full of beautiful ornaments and twinkling lights. I love it all.

R42, your post leads me to believe that you refer to Jesus Christ as Jesus X.

I just got lite xmas decor up.

The funny thing is I used to have these terrible nightmares when I forgot it was Christmas and had to make Christmas ornaments out of paper to put on the branches because I couldn’t not have a decorated tree for Christmas. I *had* to have Christmas & I had to decorate. I would wake up all sweaty & very upset

This year there will be no Christmas tree because fuck it. I don’t care. My family is mostly dead. The ones who are still alive are Trumpers living in FL. It makes me wonder if my dreams were prescient — I knew that Christmas was getting less & less important s and that I was trying to fend off/postpone the day when Christmas would no longer have any meaning for me.

[quote]I stopped putting up a tree 4 years ago and gave my artificial to one of my friends who oddly leaves it up all year (and changes the "ornaments" based of the time of year, particular holiday, etc.).

You know, that’s not a bad idea.

I’ve been recently thinking about how sad I’ll be having to take it down in a few weeks, but then I wonder if I would get bored with it if I kept it up.

I just got a Christmas wreath. It smells amazing. Just do that.

1) i live in a shitty little studio apartment with zero room for anything and all my xmas decs are at my friend's shed at the house i lived in here before. 2) this has been a shitastic year and the amount of effort involved in putting up the decs for myself alone seems silly 3) i'm moving within the next 3 months to the east coast, so i'm not sure it's really worth it to go to my friend's house and expose myself to her and her friends and family (she's quite a social person) just to take it all down and pack it back into boxes. 4) i'm just not feeling it this year. so i'll just enjoy other people's trees and dec when i see them in the evening.

R52 Have you heard of capitalization?

Those of you with an artificial tree, what brand do you have? How tall is it? With or without lights?

Can any of you give recommendations or warnings after having an artificial tree?

I am thinking about getting one for next year. It would be nice to be able to put it up earlier which I can't really do with a real one.

r52 whatever lol. nope, don't bother to capitalize. unless it has to do with money. in which case it's spelled capitalize. try to stay on topic.

[quote]Xmas celebrates the birth of Christ, a festival first celebrated 335 CE.

R42, a festivity that's some three hundred forty some odd years late for the supposed event that it's commemorating doesn't get to own the occasion - especially since the holiday - the birth of the sun - was observed millenia before ̅χ̅ρ̅ was even imagined.

R50 you don't have to take it down! It's a winter seasonal decoration, so you can leave it up even until March or whenever the weather starts warming up and the days really get longer. I guess this might not apply if you live in the South somewhere. I leave mine up until it's noticeably lighter and warmer out, usually in Feb-March.

I have a beautiful 7 ft slim pre-lit Christmas tree that fits perfectly in the corner of my place. My grandmother gave me all of her classy glass ornaments before she passed away. Unfortunately, they're all starting to break because they're so old. I took the ones in really bad shape, smashed them up in a bucket and put the pieces in new, clear glass ornaments. I gifted them to my brother and sister two Christmases ago and kept the third. Best gift ever! I have my tree connected to a smart plug. I love it!

[quote]I mainly just put it up as an FU to all the jerk parents that kick their kids out of the house for being LGBTQ.

Yeah. That makes sense.

Decorating for holidays is for fraus.

[quote]Those of you with an artificial tree, what brand do you have?

lol, what? I've had my tree over 10 years. I have no idea.

[quote]Can any of you give recommendations or warnings after having an artificial tree?

I don't like pre-lit trees, if the lights break you're stuck with broken lights on your tree.

I have a large Ficus tree in my living room that I decorate...it looks cool...and different

R61, regarding pre-lit trees, tell me about it. I only had mine 2 years and large sections of the tree wouldn't light up. It's the "Holiday Time" brand sold at Wal-Mart. There's 300 lights on the tree, and half of them weren't working. I'm not going through 150 bulbs one at a time to figure out which one was causing this.

I anticipated something like this eventually happening, but I assumed I could just remove the string of lights and just replace them with a new set of lights. It took me over two hours to get the original lights off the tree. They're attached to the branches with hundreds of plastic clips, and plastic zip ties that I had to cut off. They're also completely tangled into all the branches.

R63 That’s why I bought one of the trees that wasn’t pre-lit. I don’t like those pre-lit ones. So I paid $40 for my 6.5 ft tree from Walmart. For the price, it’s fine (although I think it could have used a few more branches).

this year is more about the food for me. More simple and More days

Who has taken their tree down? I'm keeping mine up until Biden's inauguration.

I took mine down the day after Christmas. Though it's a small 4' tree that I put on a plant stand, so it doesn't take much time

I'll never understand people like you, R67.

My brother and I took ours down the day before yesterday.

First year in my life I didn’t have a Christmas tree.

Mine is still up. Don't worry, it's fake. I still turn the lights on every night. On Inauguration Day I lit it in the morning and left it on all day, like it was Christmas.

Fuck this year(s), fuck Trump and fuck Covid. I'm in no rush to tear down one tiny spot of joy in my life just because of someone else's arbitrary timeline.

I'm Jewish, so I don't feel the need to turn my house into a coniferous forest every December. At least when I light Hanukkah candles, I do it away from flammable plant matter.

[quote]I mainly just put it up as an FU to all the jerk parents that kick their kids out of the house for being LGBTQ.

It twas many, many moons ago but I'm among that number. Thanks for the solidarity!

R71, I did the same thing waiting until Inauguration Day. Best Christmas gift ever.