Are you posh or naff in the festive pine politics stakes?

The Christmas creep seems to get earlier every year, its rules ever more complicated. As No 10 unveils its fir, Helen Coffey turns a (fairy) light on the complexities of arboreal etiquette

- Helen Coffey

Forget “If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Here’s a new bit of arboreal philosophy to chew over: If you put your Christmas tree up on 30 November, does it make you posh or gauche? Is it middle class to have multiple trees? And are coordinated decorations common or classy?

For a nation that imported the Christmas tree tradition from elsewhere - we have Queen Victoria’s German husband Prince Albert to thank for its widespread adoption - Brits sure have a lot of opinions about what constitutes the “correct” way of doing things.

First up, there’s the increasingly spicy debate on when your greenery should go up. Dubbed by some “The Big Treekend”, the first weekend of the month is when 33 per cent of people put up their tree. As that falls slightly later this year, with the first December weekend not happening until Saturday 6 and Sunday 7, many have gone for the first Sunday of Advent, 30 November, instead.

This, to me, feels somewhat excessive (if nothing else, that’s a lot of pine needles to vacuum at a time when you'd preferably keep housework to the bare minimum). If I manage to get myself into gear at all, it’s usually in a stressed-out, mildly hungover whirlwind come the middle of December.