I've been thinking about asking the local tree farm if they'll let us take the entire tree, roots n' all. They give you a saw and you choose and cut the tree yourself, so they wouldn't care about any extra work required... in fact we're saving them a bit since they don't need to remove the dead stump later.
The only problem is that they may figure out that if we buy a live tree we may not be back for a few years.
