From UO.com:

The holiday season has ended, as we get ready for the springtime you will see some changes taking place. One of these changes is that on January 15th the Holiday Trees automatically turned themselves off and went back to easily storable deed forms. This was a mandate from the Royal Guards Fire Prevention Task Force in order to prevent those devastating post-holiday fires started by neglected trees. Please Note that you MUST place your Holiday Tree deeds in a place for safe keeping because if they are left on the ground they will decay. (We hope to have a change in place by Thursday that will disable this decay timer.)

You will be able to place your Holiday Trees beginning around December 1st and must remove them on January 15th.

Also on January 15th, a royal decree was set into place to stop the handing out of holiday items to new and returning citizens of Sosaria until the next winter holiday season arrives.

It's January 18 now. Anyone know how long before the deeds decay coz I haven't logged for a while now? I only put a couple trees up but I don't want to lose them.

My tree deeds were automatically locked down so they don't decay. Bravo, devs, for doing this.

could you pick them up mine were locked down but could not pick them up after release them

Yeah, I saw your post after I made mine and the answer was the same as yours. I could not pick up the deeds after releasing them. One of my characters was able to pick them up, though. From reading your thread it seems like only the person who placed the tree can pick up the deeds.

What a silly rule. If I want to leave my tree up until July in real life then I should be able to do so in UO!! I demand justice!