Allow me to cut to the chase. You know what Christmas is, you know about trees (hell, you even set one up!) and you definitely don’t need a pre-recipe life story. So let’s start with our variables.
In order to maximize expected tree value (ETV), we will seek to find the global maximum of the graph that plots it against time from December 25th. If you are easily scared by math jargon, be mindful that all the words I have written so far and will continue to write have absolutely zero semantic value, and have been placed strategically to make me look smart. I’m not even a mathematician.
Before diving into my fully accurate, triple-checked, double-blind-peer-reviewed math, let’s do a little background research. Google says trees should be taken down 12 days after Christmas, as per tradition. Said tradition is supported by no data and will thus be ignored. Some people on Reddit take it down on New Year’s Eve. This is unhinged. However, the general range seems to be from Jan. 1 to Jan. 6th. Are they right? Are they wrong? Let’s find out.
Assuming a hypothetical Christmas celebrant, what do they gain (or lose) from having a Christmas tree up? Firstly, perhaps more importantly, they gain a certain amount of Jolly (which I will denote as J). Having much jolly before Thanksgiving is undesirable, but gaining jolly afterward is “the shit”, as the kids say. On the other end, Jolly is good up until January 1st, and begins to decay until Blue Monday (the third Monday of January) whereupon everyone around the world becomes sad. Having large amount of Jolly by Blue Monday is suspicious, and will make one lose social status. Speaking of social status, that is also a consequence of Christmasing: having a tree up at the right time will gain you social status, and vice versa. Therefore, our ETV at least depends on Jolly and social status optimization.
To further complicate matters, there is Evil Santa. According to several reports, keeping your Christmas decorations up after January 6th risks spawning Evil Santa, who will immediately be alerted as to your location. Encountering Evil Santa is bad, as he will make you lose all of your Jolly and social status (because he kills you). There doesn’t seem to be a good estimate for Evil Santa spawn chances, but I think it starts at 5% and rises by 5% every night.
With all our variables in place, we can now make some cool graphics:
I have designed this ingenious plot using professional graphing tools. As you can see, because Jolly decreases exponentially, we encounter an interesting issue: if we want to be ready for Blue Monday, we actually need to take down our tree before Christmas. Isn’t this bizarre? Yes, it is. However, I have found a small exploit that may turn the Christian world on its head.
As it turns out, they forgot to patch a bug from the 2,000 B.C. update. Originally, these were supposed to be the modifiers for social status:
However, due to a small error with unsigned integers and overflow, the social status bonus instead defaulted to its highest possible value: 4,294,967,295. This led to the following chart:
Do you see the issue here? Yeah. Therefore, this leads us to an unorthodox approach: keeping your tree up year-round actually gives you a boost to social status that far surpasses the Blue Monday penalty. Simple, right? However… you may have forgotten about one small issue.
That’s right. Just a few short days after Christmas, the chance to encounter Evil Santa will be 100% every single night. What do we do? Well, there is actually some inbuilt counterplay that we can abuse. Note the following graph:
Yes, you read that right—there is actually a quadratic, positive correlation between social status and income. This means, using the fact that Neil Gaiman makes $1m a year with 3 million followers and I make $10 a year with 3 followers, we can calculate the regression equation to be y = 9.999 * 1^x. Wahoo!
Now, let us use the common knowledge figure that 1 point of social status equals 1 follower. That means our yearly income is $4,294,967,295. Not bad, right? Here’s where all of this comes into play: Evil Santa Counterstrategy.
Evil Santa is strong, but not invincible. Regular firearms do not have any effect on him, but missiles and anti-tank weaponry do. With four billion dollars, our nightly defense budget is $11,767,033. This is good, really good. The first thing you should do with this money is reinforce your house to protect your family. Then, splurge on anything from F-22 raptors (you will need to save up a few nights) to automated turrets.
Q.E.D. The best time to take down your Christmas tree is never, so long as you don’t mind living in fear that he will find some tunnel, some vent, some way into your house while you sleep. It is a test of skill, a game of wits. How long will you stand? I wish you the best of luck this post-Christmas season.
Cheers, and stay Jolly!
Tiny Hydra 
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