This is Steve Allen's A Little Bit Extra, leading Britain's conversation.

You're listening to our podcast of Steve Allen.

Morning everybody, welcome along to your free podcast for today, Thursday.

December the 1st, December the first, only 25 days to go until an old man with a white beard

crawls down your chimney and hopefully leaves you some nice presence.

If, of course, you don't have a chimney, he'll just break in as per usual, which is great.

It's going to go really quickly. I promise you, this year is going to go faster than you've ever, ever imagined.

Now they're saying people are going to have to pay over the odds for the turkeys. Trees are more expensive. Why trees would be more expensive? I've got no idea. It just grows. It doesn't know what season it is. It doesn't know about this and that. So just shop around for your trees. Okay, just to make sure you get the right tree. But you want the right height at the right price. And I don't know really what the right price would be of a Christmas tree now. 50 quid, 50, 60 quid, something like that.

I would think that's what a real Christmas tree will cost you. They normally tell you the price

in feet and they say, oh, it's 20 quid a foot or something like that. So you could be paying

£100 for a tree and what you have to wrestle with in your mind is whether or not you really want

to spend £100 on a Christmas tree,

which is a lot of outlay when you consider that if you put it up too early and you've got

central heating, it will shed its needles like there is no tomorrow.

Every time I used to put one up at home years and years and years and years ago,

every time you brush past it, half a ton of needles would fall to the floor,

which I quite liked, actually. It just made, in fact, by halfway through December, I was just left

with a twig in a pot, which wasn't as exciting, I'm afraid, wasn't as exciting, but still good.

Still good, still nice. Cheapest buy, a place to buy real Christmas tree. I mean the the cheapest of the Nordman

Christmas trees. They say Aldi is the home. This is a 1.5 to 1.75. Well, that's not very big,

is it really? They, these are grown in Scotland. Interestingly, B and Q, most from Britain,

but Serbian spruce are growing in this country as well.

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