Black Friday - Green Saturday

After shopping until you dropped yesterday on Black Friday, a event religiously avoided by TPP, the Christmas season officially begins.  This means that people will be shopping for a conifer tree.  It turns out that 364 days ago, while avoiding Black Friday, TPP posted a blog providing simple description of how to distinguish your basic conifer genera, pines, firs, and doug-firs used as Christmas trees here in easter North America.  Our tree will be bought today, not because it will be put on display right away, but because all these trees have been harvested and are just sitting around.  So buy one now, and put it in a bucket of water until you're ready to move it into the house.  It also helps to spray the tree with WiltProof, if you have any left over from spraying the rhododendrons. 
Of course, in Australia, in Queensland, who knows what our tree was?  Somehow that information was lost from memory.  And in the early days of our wedded life the Phactors had a large, spiny Euphorb that served as our tree, an aberration that probably warped our poor daughter during her infancy.  Ultimately this tree out grew our house so we changed to the traditional conifer.