Entertainment

All Spruced up!

Like boutiques, bars and restaurants, Christmas tree options vary sharply by neighborhood: Singles in the East Village tend to want short, skinny firs for their tiny apartments; others want evergreens that will last past New Year’s while they travel out of town; in Park Slope, of course, they seek out organic specimens. The folks in Cobble Hill come out with the whole brood to make it a family experience, work gloves and all.

PHOTOS: NYC CHRISTMAS TREES

Thankfully, New Yorkers meet the daunting challenges — a lack of square footage and an elevator, among them — with a holiday decorating style all their own. Here are six examples . . .

The not-so-sad Charlie Brown tree

Last year, Ieva Urbaite sat on her bunk bed in her shoebox-size NYU dorm in the West Village, feeling homesick for her family’s big Christmas celebration back in Lithuania. She was walking through a local drugstore when something caught her eye: a tiny tree about 18 inches tall that looked like the one Charlie Brown is forced to buy when it’s the last one left on the lot.

She bought it, put it on her kitchenette table and planted an ornament on top. Small as it is, the simple fake sapling does the trick until she travels to see some of her family in Colorado.

“I don’t want to have to deal with all the cleanup and everything,” says Urbaite, 20, who now displays the tree in her new home in Bay Ridge where she lives while finishing school. “I’ll just whip out the little Christmas tree, stick the little bauble on there and call it a day.”

The all-pink-everything tree

Designer Leila Shams learned the hard — and gross — way why you don’t leave your tree up until February. Around Valentine’s Day last year, her tree got infested with praying mantises, which had apparently grown from eggs laid in the branches, something that her tree seller said is not uncommon. She ended up throwing out all the ornaments and starting from scratch this year.

“It’s definitely a pain in New York,” she says of putting up a tree.

This year, she got a 12-foot wonder delivered from Brooklyn to the 1,800-square-foot SoHo apartment she shares with her fiancé, Brent Dougherty, 32. Shams, 38, adorned it in her favorite colors: pink and purple. And she’s going to get rid of it in January this time, no matter how much a struggle it is.

The too-tall tree

Kelly Brady knew that she wanted a big tree this year. The 33-year-old public relations executive didn’t quite know how big, so when the delivery guys showed up with a 9-foot-tall behemoth, it barely fit in the elevator, let alone in her two-level, 1,800-square-foot SoHo loft.

Luckily, the delivery company had a handsaw in the truck, so they spent 10 minutes on the floor of the apartment cutting about 2 feet off it. Instead of tossing out the extra bits, Brady’s husband, Walter Zegers, 38, got a flash of creativity. He took a drill to them, and, voilà: seasonal candleholders.

The rest of the tree is decked out in local ornaments from places like Dylan’s Candy Bar, as a way to celebrate their life in NYC.

Having a tree “means a lot to my life in New York,” she says. “It’s important for us to celebrate Christmas in New York while we’re here.”

The his-and-his trees

Hairstylist Paul Labrecque was going so overboard festooning his salons for Christmas, his staff asked him to stop.

“They said I’m not an equal-opportunity Hanukkah person,” he jokes. “In my private life, I can do whatever I want to do.”

The DUMBO apartment Labrecque, 50, and his husband Brian Cantor, 53, moved into this year has two big windows, and that gave him an idea: How about his-and-his trees — one for each window?

The couple chose a floral theme using silk flowers. The festive arrangement almost didn’t happen: When the couple first met 25 years ago, his Jewish partner was not a fan of Christmas trees.

“I said, ‘You’ve got to get over that one, honey, because that would be a breaker,’ ” Labrecque recalls. “He got into it.”

The tree of knowledge

When Munira Khapra moved into a 630-square-foot apartment in the Financial District, she didn’t have the time to put up a tree. She also never got around to putting in a bookshelf for her art books that had been sitting idle since she finished NYU grad school last year. That’s when the solution hit her: Make the books into a tree.

The process was complicated — it required the help of her boyfriend and a cousin to get the right arrangement.

Even though Khapra, a 35-year-old grant writer, grew up in an Indian Muslim household and is dating someone Jewish, she says the tree speaks to the unity of the season. “I think that’s what it means to grow up in America,” she says.

The plush jungle tree

As a kid, designer Lela Rose’s mother would give her a special present every year: a string that she’d have to follow all through the house to find the surprise, which was always a new stuffed animal from Steiff, the German doll company.

“They’re the most beautiful little stuffed animals,” she says.

She turned her childhood collection into tree ornaments, and added more throughout her life. Today, a total of 300 Steiff animals decorate the evergreen in her three-floor, 5,500-square-foot, TriBeCa home. Her husband, Brandon Jones, 43, will arrange them creatively, with a wolf chasing a bird, for instance.

Her kids Grey, 11, and Rosey, 6, each receive a new stuffed animal every year so they can also start their own collections. After all, the toys influenced Rose’s decision to go into fashion.

“They’re so special,” she says. “It probably is an influence, just being surrounded by things that are high-quality.”

tdonnelly2@nypost.com