On February 20, 2018, at 8:50 AM, Bruce  Johnson <xxxxxx@pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:

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>p.s. When I was growing up, it was traditional in my house to put up the tree well before Christmas & keep it up till the 'Celebration of the Arrival of the Three Kings' but other families had all sorts of differing traditions. 
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>Heh, back when I was in College some friends had this great idea to start a tradition: a big party on January 31 where we’d take out their Christmas tree and toss it on a bonfire with great pomp and ceremony  ( or in this case, raising toasts and enthusiastically drumming on anything we could find :-) 
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>That tradition lasted exactly one year when they saw the 20’ gout of flame in the sky produced by tossing a tinder-dry Christmas tree on a fire and realized they’d been storing that *in their house*  8-)

A few pagan friends of mine have a similar tradition - except we break the tree down into a reasonable size and burn it on Samhain (Halloween).