How green is your evergreen tree?

TPP gets asked all the time about which is better for the environment, a "live" cut tree or an artificial tree for your holiday decorations? When you take the usual case, the answer is pretty simple. First please understand that no one is cutting down a forest anywhere to provide your tree.  They are farmed; they just take 7-10 years for the crop to get to a harvest-able stage. This means that the soil isn't being tilled/disturbed annually, so soil erosion is minimized, and some wildlife can live there too.  You natural tree can be mulched at the end of the season, totally recycled, so long as you don't use the stooopid plastic bags to stop a few needles from dropping on your carpets.  Just sweep them up. 
Most artificial trees are made of materials that are not recyclable, so even when you use such a tree for several seasons, it has a trash/land fill cost. You would probably have to use an artificial tree for 20 years to reduce the cost to a par with a natural tree. In TPP's opinion you can use natural trees with a more or less clear ecological conscience. Of course if you want a shocking pink tree to complement the leg in a net stocking lamp, well, then artificial is the way to go. Of course you could also flock your tree thus turning a natural tree into something nearly artificial. Who knows what that stuff is?
Signs for flocked trees generates some fond memories for TPP of his ancient school days when the assistant principle, a former Marine drill instructor turned punitive educator, used to impose detention upon students he caught cursing.  Now a good malediction is a useful thing for dealing with life's misfortunes and mishaps, particularly the unjust ones, but detention was awful. As bright, young enterprising youth interested in increasing our word power, a search was commenced for obscure words that sounded like swearing, but weren't. They just had to have a certain quality when said a certain way at the right time.  Our favorites were "scud" and "flock".  After being dragged to the Principal's office for saying, FLOCK!, because the contents of your locker spilled out onto the floor between classes.  And when asked about the swearing, you said, you explain "All I said was, flock, a group of sheep". The fun came from the look the Principal gave his Assistant.  
Now what was your question?

Christmas tree time

Issues:
Live or artificial?  Mrs. Phactor is no neutral on this score it must be a live tree, abeit one soon to die.
It's the sense of it, the presence of the foliage, the aroma.
Fir or pine: Again no neutrality; it will be fir, it's the aroma.  The preferred tree is a balsam, but as nice ones have proven so hard to find in recent years, Fraser it will be.
Sooner vs. later:  Sooner! Buy as soon as trees arrive in your area and put their trunks in a bucket of water in a cool place, they don't get any fresher. Our tree will be bought tomorrow & placed in water until the house is ready for it's installation. Ours stays in the unheated garage.  Sometimes the tree gets a spray of wiltproof, ask for it by name, but timing on this is tricky. This year it was too warm to spray rhododendrons & other evergreen dicots before this.  Often it then gets too cold. Tomorrow may be mild enough to do them all.  Wreaths do better with a dunking in water over night and then wilt -proofed.  Just wish the bloody stuff wasn't so expensive. 
Is this  a green crop?  Yes, the trees are a crop and its sustainable. Trees are not being cut in the wild unless your name is Arlan (a Texan) and you like field grown Junipers, red cedars. They do smell good too, but oh do prickly. 
How do you keep cats out of your tree?  How do you keep cats from doing anything? Our current kitty-girls find the trees interesting, but they don't try climbing them. Drinking from the tree stand's water is more interesting, but still as an old practice indestructible ornaments including some bells get hung on the lowest branches just in case, and any ornament that looks too much like a kitty toy must be hidden up high or it becomes a kitty toy.  The young of our two has broken a couple of small ornaments that attracted her attention (making it their fault).

How green is your Christmas tree?

Maybe this is a little late to help this season, but here's something to think about.  Our "live", or rather slowly dying fir (they have been cut after all.) is quite green and fragrant the more so that we buy cut trees early and put them in a bucket of water to maintain hydration as much as possible. This is usually about the time the rhododendrons and other shrubs prone to winter damage get "wilt-proofed".  This waxy spray also works great on cut trees and other cut greens, e.g., wreaths, to slow their dehydration and reduce the falling needles.  It also helps if the part of the house where you put the tree on display stays on the cool side at night and isn't in the direct blast of hot air from your furnace.  TPP regularly gets asked about whether real trees are better than artificial trees from an ecological perspective, and the answer is quite simply, yes.  Christmas trees are a sustainable, renewable crop on a seven to eight year cycle.  No one goes out and cuts trees from forests; they are a crop grown here in the northern portions of the USA or in the Great White North, that nice country above us.  Although this year a neighbor who decided to remove an offending blue spruce from his yard used the top for their Christmas tree and the bottom for their yule log.  Now artificial trees do last for years, but as Mrs. Phactor puts it, they have no fragrance forever.  They are made of metal and plastic, difficult to impossible to recycle, and probably manufactured in China.  So how green is all of that?  So have no guilt or even second thoughts about buying a real tree each year.  Tree farmers are depending on you. 

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.