This was Christmas 1951 at my grandma's house. Tree looks quite similar to the one at the top of this thread. Grandma lived about 20 miles north of New York City, so this look may have been the standard for Christmas trees nationwide back then. No tinsel on Grandma's, that stuff had a habit of shorting out the lights. The vertical decorations you do see are just painted and twisted strips of metal. As these don't bend or drape, they are not likely to short the lights.
Note the Philco TV to the left.
In the pictures at the top of this thread, the TV looks like a bakelite Admiral console.
Posting question: I used this picture of Grandma's tree in an older Audiokarma thread, and the server won't let me attach/upload it again. Herre I linked to my own web page to get it to show here. That would indicate that there is some way to "attach" the old uploaded image in another thread, but it's not at all obvious as to how to do that. I can understand the server operators not wanting duplicate image files eating up too much storage space, but there should be some way to refer to the old image in a new thread.