In pictures: Christmas tree world

It's a Christmas tree but perhaps not as we know it - a 40m (131-foot) giant in the Spanish Basque Country.

Conventional Christmas trees - like the expanding one in Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet - just seem to get bigger. This one stands at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

As with Berlin's tree, the one rivalling Nelson's Column on London's Trafalgar Square is a gift from Norway.

In another European capital, Rome, a Christmas tree has been erected for the first time at the Coliseum

The Italian town of Gubbio has a giant Christmas tree picked out in lights on nearby Mount Ingino.

This is one tree you would not want to knock over: a 8.5-m (28-foot) creation by the glass workers of Murano, Venice.

Russia had "New Year's Trees" in Soviet times. This year, Moscow's Red Square boasts a giant artificial tree but the decoration looks fairly traditional.

This tree in Rio de Janeiro is not only artificial - it even floats, moored on the Brazilian city's Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon.

Among the skyscrapers of New York, even the baubles have to be giant, it would seem.

Coconuts are being used to decorate this giant artificial tree in a suburb of the Philippine capital, Manila.

And Christmas also increasingly features in non-Christian Asia. Here in Chongqing, China, the tree is made up of 100,000 Coca Cola cans - another Western import...

But for simplicity itself, here is French artist Geraud Periole's real tree illuminated in festive colours in Geneva, Switzerland.

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