Kittens and Christmas trees. Pls help!

[McBounty]

My Christmas tree has been up for 1 day and my kittens are already driving me crazy with it.

I was aware that they may want to climb it. I cannot take a whole bunch of weeks of this each day. Haha!

They're both almost 5 and a half months old.

Please advise the best way to keep these kitties from ruining my tree.

PS, it is artificial.

Even my lovely, gentle, endlessly lazy old boy climbed the Christmas tree in his first year. My new tree-climbing hunter demon would devastate one in minutes. We're going to get a tree anyway, but accept that it'll be her climbing frame and not use any breakable decorations. I'm planning to use all natural stuff instead- dried citrus, chillies, cinnamon sticks bundled up, bay leaves, that kind of thing.

Each year dboycat says to dgirlcat 'oh look the slaves have brought another tree in.'

Dgirlcat looks over and says 'yes and they've moved the liiter tray 30mm to get it in'
Dboycat 'shall we climb it this year'
Dgirlcat 'no, we don't want to encourage them, turn your back on it, tails up and walk away in disgust, though you can pop round the back of it later for an alfresco poo.'
'Oh ok sis, next year?'
'Maybe'