artificial

My family always had a real Christmas tree - no exceptions.

Sure, real trees can be a bit of a pain, but they always make for good memories. For starters, my family is from Pennsylvania. My mother and father moved to Greenville, South Carolina, right before I was born. In our part of PA, the tradition is to put your tree up the week leading up to Christmas Eve. In our part of SC, it seems like the tree has to be up Thanksgiving afternoon.

That being said, we were always the transplanted (no pun intended) Yankees standing at the Christmas tree farm 3 days before Christmas Eve. Of course, all the great/good/decent/still living trees has been chosen already, and we often settled for a very "Charlie Brown" sort of thing.