Christmas in February?

As many of you may have heard my tirade in December, we got our first live Christmas tree in St. Louis this year and I was shocked to get to the tree farm and find spray painted trees! I had never heard of such a crazy practice! Anyway, we ended up cutting down our painted live tree and decorating it in the house. We took the tree out of the water right after Christmas and put it in our compost/log pile in the backyard to later cut it up for firewood for the fire pit. Today I let the cats out to play outside and they decided to go play around the tree. I went outside to watch them and was quite disturbed that the tree is STILL bright green! It's been dead now for over two months and is still errily bright green! I'm thinking that we can probably use it again next year if the spray paint doens't wash off - we should probably just put it in the basement for storage and then we won't have to bother with cutting down another tree next year. The Midwest is a strange strange place! Welcome to Corn Cold County!