Did people really put the tree up on Christmas Eve years ago?

Maybe because they were lit up with candles? I don't know what if any kind of lights my mom's family had on their trees.

When I was a kid the earliest it would go up was my grandma's birthday, the 18th. If you put it up too early it would be starting to dry by Christmas.

Somewhere along the line we started doing it about a week before, probably because we had so many kids and organizing everything was a major production.

It went up late Christmas Eve, just before we left for midnight mass.

Nd it comes down on New Year’s Day, if not sooner

I understand the practice years ago, but seeing a tree up say December 10th builds the spirit of Christmas. It's such a beautiful decoration; the longer it's up, the better.

I don’t need weeks of it; I liked putting up the tree just a few days before. It was something to look forward to.

I'm not sure when it stopped (perhaps in '53/'54) but there was NO SIGN of Christmas inside my house BEFORE CHRISTMAS as far as a tree was concerned. SANTA brought presents AND the tree!

My folks waited until I went to bed ON CHRISTMAS EVE - and THEN put up and decorated the tree, complete with the Lionel train ready to run underneath the tree, with the platform covered with little sparkle houses and plastic snow! Oh, and a row of wrapped presents in front!

I think I know now why they always looked so tired when we went to Grand-pap's for Christmas dinner....

They told us Santa brought the tree. I actually suspect it was done because on Christmas Eve you could buy a tree for about 25 cents. My dad would never admit in in later years, though.

We weren't poor, but we weren't rich either. Our parents did lots of interesting things to cut corners and save money. My wife came from a family with five kids. Their Sunday routine consisted of going to church, And since Catholic Communion required fasting that morning, their first meal was a hearty lunch. Sunday evening was popcorn night while watching the Ed Sullivan Show. The kids looked forward to this and loved it. Can you imagine how much money their dad saved over the years by feeding five kids popcorn for dinner one night a week?

trees were FREE then. My father was cheap as heck. The tree sellers abandoned their lots at about 5 PM and gave trees away.

The old man wouldn't pay full price for a tree if you threatened him with a gun, but we still had to pay like a buck on Christmas Eve.

-- Mal

But even when my son was young (30 yrs ago) and we visited Mom on Christmas, she had not bought a tree yet on Christmas Eve, so we went out and . . . got a free tree at an abandoned tree lot! They had even put a "free trees" sign. I was surprised this sort of thing was still going on. Happy, but surprised.

Maybe my father went out too early for the last-chancers to abandon their tree lots completely.

-- Mal

that said conifer be very very VERY freshly cut.

And even after the dawn of the era of electric lighting, until the last quarter-to-half century those lights got HOT.

decorating before Halloween.

12 days of Christmas. We actually put it up about one week before Xmas as years went by.

We'd go and find the most scraggly tree on the lot, take it home, and transform it into a thing of beauty with our decorations.

Sort of like in the Peanuts Christmas special, but this wàs before that show first aired.

One or two strings of lights on the front porch... an assortment of household decorations... and the tree. All on Christmas Eve Day. And at one point, Mom started putting McDonald's gift certificates with friends names on the tree... So friends always found their way over to our house for those and the mini candy canes that also decorated the tree.

And everything came down on New Years Day. I think part of that was an attempt by my parents to not over-commercialize the day.

greens till the eve of the Solstice or something like that, but I forget what it is. I'll try to find it and post it if I do.

It's not simply a song. It's an actual thing called Twelvetide. It's a Christian celebration and it ends the day before the feast of Epiphany.

Put the tree up on the eve and leave it up until the feast of Epiphany (Jan.6th) or Orthodox Christian day (Jan.7th).

That's twelve days plus 1 or 2 days.

I don't know why people did it and still do it. But maybe it is rooted in Twelvetide.

Maybe. Maybe not.

tree on Christmas Eve. Maybe we were broke that year, not sure. I was pretty young at the time.

... my father was a notorious procrastinator, and so our Christmas Eve "tradition" was to race around frantically trying to find a halfway decent tree among the (leftover, marked down to a dollar) lots still open. This was compounded by the need to deal with my elder brother's birthday, which fell on 24 December. I remember a lot of yelling.

So, insofar as 50-60 years counts as "years ago," I'd say some people did.

-- Mal

So somewhere @ the 21st.

We had electric lights but there was a real concern for fires.
The tree came down on January 2, absolutely.

The tree was put up Christmas Eve.

Not too early, not too late.

I was that kid who pushed for it earlier though.