Christmas trees under £50

What £50 buys

Below £50 the trees are small, lit, or both. The best value for a bedroom or a landing is a 3ft fibre optic tree, which lights every tip from one lamp and needs no decorating. For a desk or a shop counter, a 2ft pre-dressed tree at £14.99 is finished out of the box. For a doorstep, a 2ft or 3ft potted frosted tree with battery LEDs does the job without a socket. And for a flat that needs a tall tree in a narrow space, the tinsel pencil pine gives 6.6ft of height for less than the cost of a light set.

What it does not buy

A full-width 6ft green tree with 1,000 tips starts at about £99, and a pre-lit one at about £129. A £45 tree described as 5ft or 6ft will be a pencil or tinsel tree, a twig tree, or a sparse PVC tree with a few hundred tips. None of those is a bad tree, but they are not the living-room centrepiece, and the tip count on the card is the honest guide. If that is what you need, the £50 to £100 band is where the standard 5ft and 6ft trees start.

Lights are the value at this price

A tree under £50 that has 100 or 400 LEDs built in is worth more than its tip count suggests, because a separate 400-LED set costs £15 to £20. The shimmer cone trees with 400 micro LEDs, the 4ft microdot trees and the small pre-lit pines all fall into this group. Battery models add the cost of three AA cells a season and nothing else.

Delivery on small orders

There is no minimum order. A single £14.99 tree ships by tracked parcel at no charge, and so does a box of baubles if you add one. Returns are the same as on the dearest tree: 14 days to change your mind, complete and repacked.