O Christmas Tree! O Christmas Tree! Thy leaves are so unchanging.

[TripletDaddy]

The age old question: how to buy a tree early enough to enjoy the scents and sights for the month of December.....without having it shrivel up and die, becoming a dried out pile of kindling in the process.

I have always been a "real tree" guy, although I make no judgments of my faux-tannenbaum brethren. Unfortunately, our trees would always dry out and even start turning brown within a few weeks. As a result, we would either have to wait until mid-December to get our tree, or buy it in early December but watch it die before Christmas day in a pool of stagnant water.

After several years of failure to moderate success, I think I have found a formula that works for me in helping extend the life of our tree. I would be interested in hearing other tips for success, if anyone has them.

Basically, I only do 3 things, but my trees always live through the month without drying and almost never without loss of color.

First, it starts with the stand. I abandoned the "spike in the middle" approach and got one of those "vise around the diameter of the trunk" styles. I found that the spike somehow inhibited the tree from drinking the water. I really have no way of proving that to be true, but it works for me, so leave me alone.

Second, we find out when the trucks are delivering the latest trees and get there when the trucks are unloading. In SoCal, it isnt terribly easy to hike to the nearby forest and cut down your own tree, so you are relegated to the Home Depots, Targets, and Lowe's of the world. These big box retailers get trees in frequently throughout the month. Be there when a shipment arrives. You will be amazed at the quality difference between those that have been cut recently and those that have been sitting around for days or even a week or more.

The third step has made the biggest difference for us. When you buy your tree and they trim it up and wrap it in that plastic netting, they give you the option of cutting off a bit from the trunk. Most people say yes. I used to, as well. Then, we would get home, casually go inside, unload the tree, eat, talk, get the tree stuff out, etc...Finally, about an hour or more later, we would get around to putting the tree in water. That same water would go un-absorbed for the entire month of December. The tree would shrivel up and die.

One year, for whatever reason, I decided to decline the free trunk chop. We took the tree home. I used a handsaw and cut off about an inch or two from the trunk. I also used a drill to drill a series of holes into the bottom of the trunk----not to place the trunk on some medieval spike, but rather so that the trunk could absorb water. I acted pretty quickly, before any sap or anything else could drip down or otherwise clog the pores of the trunk. The whole process of drilling and cutting took about 5 mins, max. I quickly put the tree in the stand. I then filled the entire tree stand with water and went to bed (note: my strategy works even if you don't go to bed. For example, you can watch TV or eat and it will still work).

Lo and behold, every year when I wake up, my tree has absorbed about half of the water ration (sometimes more, sometimes a little less). I wind up having to replenish the water about every 3 days for the entire month of December. And the tree usually does just fine...long enough for us to dump it in some bin somewhere.

We went and purchased our tree this past Wednesday. I used my standard method. Today, I replenished water in the stand for the second time (once Wednesday, once today).

Does anyone else have any strategies they use? Do those powders work--the ones you get when you buy the tree? I haven't been able to detect much difference. Does your tree drink water all month even if you cut the trunk at the store? For whatever reason, it would never work for us until we started cutting the trunk at home.