When I was in Primary School in the middle of last century, my brothers and I had a routine that we followed to the letter each year.
Around the end of November we would begin to scour the surrounding scrub for a suitable tree, a she-oak. Having found one we would then return a couple of times a week to check that no-one else had taken "our" tree.
Then on the first day of the school holidays we would cut the tree down. This was back in the days when that sort of thing was quite acceptable.
We would carry it home and trim a bit off the bottom so that it would fit under the ceiling. For some reason, we never perfected the art of judging the size of the tree in comparison with the height of our ceiling. As far as I remember, every year we had to cut half a metre or more off the trunk to get it to fit.
I guess most years that would have been close to 12 days before Christmas.
