Our first ever real Christmas tree

I'm very excited - we have just bought our first ever real Christmas tree.

I'm always in two minds with christmas decorations, having been brought up in a household where the christmas decorations go up until one week before christmas, and not a day before. The thought of putting up the tree 'gasp' on 3rd December therefore seemed very shocking to me.

However, we put it up 'early' because we're away for most of the christmas period in Amsterdam and M's family home in Manchester, and we wanted to enjoy it for at least more than a few days.

A similar thing happened last year where we weren't spending any time in London at all, so shock horror we didn't put any decorations up at all. Just call us Scrooge. This was in part due to the disastrous attempt at a christmas tree the year before - our first christmas living together in London. Being total cheap skates we bought the cheapest artificial tree we could find and decorated it without any thought of a colour scheme or theme. This culminated in the worst tree ever - so bad it was in fact embarrassing.

This year, I was determined to be different, and, since I've always longed for a real tree (my family always used a battered, much loved artificial tree from the 1970s), we hopped and skipped along to our local Homebase.

At £10 it was an absolute steal, but it's perfect for our tiny flat. Admittedly, it's more of a christmas bush than tree and it will not stand straight unless we tie a ribbon around it and attach it to the wall, but I couldn't be happier. I didn't realise how ridiculously spiky they are though; my arms are covered in scratches! I also didn't know that you had to saw through the trunk to put it into a pot to allow it to absorb water. Our poor tree has been hacked at with our bread knife(!) to no avail. Let's hope it manages to make it to christmas!

We've kept to a natural silver theme, complete with warm white lights and I'm so pleased with the whole effect.

Because it can get super expensive buying and decorating a tree, I tried to be savvy when it came to the decorations.

The bulk of them came from this brilliant set of 45 silver decorations for M&S priced at a reasonable £25.

I splashed out on a couple of more expensive single items. Both of these were from M&S, but they were in the three for two offer which was happy happy (link to the apple bauble).

I also bought this sweet bird's house from House and Fraser and glass bauble. I must mention though that I'm not hugely impressed with the glass bauble which just had a rubbishy plastic tag attached, so I had to steal some twine off a christmas bag handle I'd bought for a present (Shh please don't tell Caz!). However both were half price at £2 each here and here so I can't really complain!

Which do you prefer - real or artificial trees? Where do you get your decorations from? Do you have a colour scheme you like to follow?