Millie Bobby Brown loves the holidays. Depending on who you ask, the Christmas holiday season either started on November 1 (cough, Mariah, cough) or right after Thanksgiving. I know some people who have had their trees and decorations up for weeks and others (like us) who are just doing them now. When I was growing up, my parents always got a real tree. When Mr. Rosie and I were first living together back in our dating years, we caused a slight scandal by buying an artificial one. At the time, our reasoning was we were living in an apartment with a rambunctious kitten. I just wanted the convenience of having the fake tree that I didn’t have to water and constantly sweep up needles from.
Fast-forward to 2021 when we ponder, “Should we get a real tree now that we’re in a house?” Well, we have now somehow ended up with THREE Christmas trees in one room. It’s absurd but it’s also quite nice. Anyways, back to MBB. She’s a 19-year-old powerhouse and is engaged to Jon Bon Jovi’s son, Jake. From what we’ve seen publicly, Millie and Jake appear to have a healthy, drama-free relationship. But even they cannot escape the usual holiday disagreements. In their case, they are split between types of Christmas trees. In an interview with Eating Well, MBB shared that she likes fake trees while Jake favors the real ones.
EatingWell: What are your holiday plans looking like?
Brown: I love the holidays, it’s definitely my favorite time of year. [My fiancé] Jake’s more into real trees, I like fake trees. It’s a huge debate in the house. I love hot cocoa and my tea, and I love the fire being on. I love it being freezing cold outside and the puppies and dogs are all comfy and cozy. Winter time is definitely my hibernation time, and I absolutely love being able to just be inside with the family.
It’s so relatable that an otherwise drama-free couple debates what type of tree to have in their home. I’m genuinely curious where everyone stands on the real vs. artificial tree debate! That topic reminds me of the “Bringing Back Christmas” song from the excellent musical, Spirited. As I said above, our quest to get a live tree ended up with us now having three trees. It’s ridiculous but it’s also lovely because each tree represents a different part of us. We have the artificial one that hosts all of the homemade and kitschy ornaments, a real one that we use for “fancy” ornaments, and another tiny real tree that the kids pick out to decorate themselves (and thus far they’ve tried to imitate the fancy tree by picking the tiny ball ornaments and very twinkly lights from Target). I know it’s overkill, but honestly, it makes each of us happy and grateful. To me, that’s what Christmas is all about.
Photos credit: Mediapunch/Backgrid, JW / Bang Showbiz / Avalon and via Instagram
We use the same live tree every year! It started out a teeny tiny 3 ft tall spruce. I think now it’s a little closer to 5 ft, well filled out but not huge. I can’t wait to see what it looks like in another 5 years!
That’s wonderful. If I had the garden space I’d love to do that.
Our neighbours bought one with roots about a month ago (the clocks had just changed and looking out at the back and seeing a Christmas tree totally threw me). It’s to go in a pot replacing a dead apple tree and while they won’t bring it in every year it will be getting some decorations.
We have a living tree too! A Monterey pine. It gets a bigger container after each Christmas and after the third or fourth year, depending on how much it grew, it gets planted. Our friend has a few of our trees, and we have also planted in public land. They small so good, and during the summer the birds use them.
Ok let’s do this!
My decorations got up the 1st Dec/first weekend in Dec.
I am on board with both. I had a fake tree for years when I was younger/broke and even now sometimes I look at some of the amazing ones you can buy and I’m tempted. But since we bought our house 9 years ago we have had a real tree. This year there’s a new kitchen extension at the back so rather than squeezing it into the bay window at the front (which causes a bit of a pile up of other living room furniture) the tree is going in the kitchen. It’s also 6-7 feet tall rather than the 5-6 feet that I normally order thanks to the extra space out there. I wonder if I’ll regret not going 7-8 feet but too late to change my mind now as it’s being delivered today!!!
I’ve had a bit of a epiphany in recent years about why I love Christmas. I am in no way religious and a the commercialisation of everything (buy MORE!!!) bothers me but I absolutely hate the cold and the dark. So I will do anything to make the house feel bright and cosy and count down to the shortest day of the year. It may still be dark and cold for some time after that but the light is coming back.
I’m the same, I love love love the Christmas lights because it gets dark so early but driving down the street and seeing everyone’s decorations make it so cheerful.
And that’s my main regret with moving the tree this year, you won’t be able to see the lights from the street. So I ordered a neon polar bear outline light to hang in the window instead!
Same! We just moved into a new house and my boyfriend went full Griswold with the lights. I get excited to leave so just so I can see them when we drive back. Our neighbors have really gone all out too.
💯 December 1 my fake, pre-lit tree goes up and stays until the end of January. I am not religious in the slightest but Christmas lights add warmth and cheer.
Saw a real tree catch fire as a child, I would never use a cut real tree in my home. I sleep much easier with my flocked fake tree.
I’m allergic to the real ones. It took years as a kid for us to figure that out. I do fake now. I love the real ones, but I hate the allergies and the mess they leave behind too.
Same with my family. My mom sent my brother to the hospital his first two Christmases because he was having an allergic reaction to the tree. Mom is a Christmas nut and put the individual strands of garland and a few dozen of the plastic icicles on the branched (context: it was the 60s). After the second hospital trip the doctor asked what do you do different this time every year and after she said she put up her tree. Mom said she died a little inside when the doctor told her to throw it all away. Luckily my grandmother worked in a furniture store and gave her gorgeous fake tree that lasted for 30+ years and parts I think still live on as one of her centerpieces.
Same here, I’m allergic, I love the fragrance but it irritates my sinus, and my 2 cats would go berserk, where as with the fake they don’t seem to care.
I am hosting a holiday event in 2 weeks so I decorated everything right after Thanksgiving this year, it’s nice having it all done.
Same. I’m allergic, so I’ve never had a real tree. We are on the second artificial tree of our marriage/partnership; the first one gave us 13 good years (well, about 10 good years and then it limped along for the last 2-3…pre-lit and half the lights stopped working.)
Our current artificial tree is also pre-lit; it’s a Martha Stewart that I got on a great after-Christmas sale. It’s got variable texture/color branches and even some little pinecones and I LOVE it. It goes together so easily and looks great IMO.
My youngest is of the Mariah persuasion (Christmas starts the minute she’s done trick-or-treating!) but I make her wait until the day after Thanksgiving to decorate, so we did our tree and other decor last Friday.
When we got our first tree the year we bought our house/got engaged, I bought a ton of fancy, hand-painted glass ball ornaments that are absolutely beautiful, but very fragile. Due to dogs and babies (who are now 11 and 16!) the fancy glass ornaments got shelved (I still have them, though!) in favor of shatterproof red, gold, and silver ones from Target, and all of our “special” ornaments are scattered about. When the kids were smaller I’d put them all on the same top quadrant so they weren’t accessible, but now they’re spread out. I love our tree!! Don’t know if the fancy ornaments are ever coming back. If we had a layout that would allow for a second tree, I’d do that and put them on, but our house isn’t set up for that.
My eldest is allergic. I love the scent of real trees, but I love my child. We’ve had a fairly realistic fake for a really long time, a (real) pine wreath hangs outside our front door and all the decorations have started to go up and will be up by tomorrow. Everyone has those chocolate count-down to the holidays calendars.
I love the smell of the real ones, but I like my tree up from thanksgiving to February if I’m being honest and I hate the mess of real trees, the fire hazard, and I heard the water is bad for pets? We have three dogs and two cats that would def mess with the water and knock all the needles off. I use febreeze pine plugins and fake trees
I love Christmas. My mom loved Christmas and it was always a big deal in our house. (and we always had a real tree… and a lot of presents)
So even though i am no longer a Christian- i am fully a celebrator of the holiday season.
The nice man i live with is a recovering alcoholic who had a crappy childhoos- he hates Christmas. He finds it depressing and difficult.
So- i decorate in my bedroom, ornaments on a string, several little trees that light up (no real or fake full size tree) and i put a wreath on our front door.
And Santa comes and fills stockings on Christmas eve and when he wakes up and goes to the kitchen to get his coffee, there is a full stocking and gifts from the dog and the cats for their dad.
He actually said this year that the further he gets away from his parents’ deaths (slightly more than a decade) the less painful Christmas is for him.
I just keep it low key, but i don’t ever pretend i don’t LOVE it. And we respect each other’s space on the issue. And i am sure he enjoys the gifts (some silly, some real). He does not wear the socks with the dog’s photo on them, but he will use the calendar (thank you shutterfly) with our pets posing for each month.
aww, I would wear the socks with the dog’s picture!
I have similar reasons for disliking xmas, and for years I found it annoying. but eventually I realized that no matter what I think about it, it’s going to happen. so instead of being annoyed for an entire month every year, it could just be about what I like about it (seeing friends, eating indulgent food, and the sparkly lights) and now it’s become enjoyable.
I have a small ceramic tree. no fuss no muss.
happy holidays!
Right- that is the thing- christmas is too big to ignore. It is no longer just a christian holiday- it is a societal holiday. Most things are closed. You cannot avoid it.
Also i bet your ceramic tree is super cute.
We all deal with it in our own ways.
I hope the nice man i live with finds it a little better each year.
I love Halloween and Christmas precisely because I can do what makes me happy. If you and the people in your life have 3 trees and it brings joy it’s not excessive it’s invaluable. I hope everyone is doing something for themselves to feel happiness and joy.
So this was a huge debate at our house a few years ago. We had always had live trees. Our tradition was to go to a Christmas tree farm on Black Friday and and cut down a tree, and we are very big on maintaining our holiday traditions.
Then, my dad got older and started having mobility issues and found it difficult to walk around the uneven ground of a Christmas tree farm, and we had a helper at the farm cut down the tree, and me and my sister wound up doing all the work of setting up the tree when we got home, which is fine, but my dad was kind of depressed that he couldn’t really play his part so much anymore. Then the pandemic happened and my sister, who lives out of town, didn’t come home for the holidays and we got a pre-cut tree from a big box store and I had to set it up myself, which was a pain in the ass, but fine.
But the next year the argument happened. We were done with Christmas tree farms, and there’s nothing special about getting a tree from Lowes that makes it worth the hassle to bring home, set up, decorate, and water – my mother and I argued for a fake tree, my father and sister argued for a live tree, and we were at an impasse. Ultimately we compromised. My sister and I went out and got one of those small table top trees meant for apartments that they sell at grocery stores, which is a live tree to decorate without the hassle of setting up and maintaining. And so that’s what we do now. Tiny real tree that lives on the dining room table with the presents, and we just moved Christmas dinner onto the kitchen table.
I am all about Christmas although I hold a firm boundary on not decorating before December 1st. And fake tree all the way. We grew up with (mostly) fake trees and it’s so nice to just pull it out and decorate it when you can without the logistics of having to get the real tree. They are so beautiful now and not having to wrap those lights around all the branches makes it worth every penny! (And I second the nightmare tree fire stories…I know one personally which ended very tragically and I just cemented me in the fake tree group forever)
Pre-lit is a game changer.
Before we had kids, we would buy a 3-5′ potted pine tree and then plant it in the yard after the holidays. It was fun to watch them [sloooowwwly] grow over the years and it felt more sustainable (i.e., one day my Christmas tree lot will help eliminate global warming). And, they were definitely Charlie Brown-type trees because that was all we could afford. Then we had kids and switched to a large, full artificial tree that holds more decorations.
Kids, man, they change everything
My Balsam Hill tree just arrived yesterday! This is my first year for this kind of tree, and I’m liking it! Buy it once & that’s it! If I want to smell pines or spruce or something, I can just go up into my local national forest.
We used to get real trees and I still like the smell, but watering them is a real hassle! A few years back I saw a fake one on sale and snapped it up. It’s in a pot, so you don’t need any kind of skirt. It’s pre-lit, frosted and glittered and covered in pine cones! A narrow profile, which is really great, I have several choices for where to put it. I like that it can stay up as long as I like because it just makes me so happy!
I have the ornaments down to a science, a dozen quite large mercury glass pumpkins, a MacKenzie Childs ribbon (black and cream checks with gold edges) as a garland and one of their stars on top!
Hadn’t heard of MacKenzie Childs before–woohoo, been browsing that website for a while now thanks!
I had no idea how much of a hot topic this was! We got a real tree in 2012, cut it down for $10 for participating in a forest service program. But could only cut down scraggly lodgepole pines…which are ugly asf and turns out I’m allergic. To be safe we bought a really nice artificial tree and used it for 8 years until it started looking tired (and there was the small matter of the squished mouse we found in it). Since then (3 years now) we have forgotten to get a new artificial while on sale and just go out for a real one. Turns out I’m not allergic to firs, so we just avoid pine. They are messy of course and you have to water them, and I would rather have a potted one because dead trees kind of sadden me, but everyone gets SO EXCITED when they realize our tree is real 🤣
Also: nearly every room has a tree here. The front one is real as mentioned and has family heirloom/vintage glass etc. ones on it with the 3D star I’ve owned for 20 years; the den has a silver tree covered in all the kids’ ornaments they’ve made in school; the dining room has a small potted one; each kid has a small artificial with ornaments they’ve chosen themselves. What can I say, we love trees lol