There's a certain Mudcatter who, at a very young age, decorated their tree with sprouts.

Limpit is great at undecorating trees - especially if hung with chocolate. The year she was 3, she refused to eat all her Christmas lunch and wandered off into the sitting room - to watch TV we thought. We staggered up from our lunch an hour later and looked in to find she'd stripped the tree of all but one chocolate decoration and was fast asleep in a pile of foil wrappers.

We tend not to use lights on our tree, which is always a real, hopefully pot grown one. I always try to buy a tree that is still a living plant and can go out into the garden. Our longest survivor started life at my mothers' house as one of those miniature 12" table top decorations. It's now 3ft high and at least 10 years old. Regrettably, the drought a few years ago took out our other survivor -4ft tree at 3 years and counting it was.

We use old baubles, I have an extensive collection, all bought in the last 17 years, except for two, which were possibly given to my parents for their first Christmas as a married couple, in 1952. They are pearly white with a sage green band around them, and one has the 'dimple', banded in silver, orange and purple. I say 'possibly', because I remember them on a tree in my grandparents house, so they may have been theirs and my mother acquired them when her mother died. Or they might have been a duplicate set... anyway, they're the last surviving relics of a bygone age, before tree lights were common and baubles bounced.

Of course, I still manage to buy a few new baubles every year... this year they're those long pointed lozenge shapes in green and purple.

Do you have any strange traditions when putting your tree out?

I can't remember when it started, but we have always left one chocolate decoration on the tree when putting it out for the refuse/recycling collection. I can remember my granfer telling me to leave something on it to say thank you to the tree, and when he put his tree out, there was always a little something on it. It might have been the last chocolate, or some popcorn, or apple quarters, but there was always something.

LTS