For eleventh-hour Honolulu Christmas tree buyers, the only game in town yesterday was Specialty Holiday Season in 'Aiea — two white-and-red tents behind the Best Buy store.

And even there the pickings were slim in the morning — three dozen leftover 2-foot noble fir trees that proprietor Thomas Esperanza had shipped in via Federal Express and on Friday was selling at $95 each, along with some 4-footers for $120 apiece.

"That was just in the beginning," said Esperanza, who owns the business that specializes in being the last place on O'ahu to get a tree each year. The higher prices were a result of the high overnight shipping costs, he said. "We brought down the prices later."

Yesterday, 2- to 3-foot "table top" trees were priced down to $55, while 3- to 4-footers were marked at $80 because, Esperanza said, he was able to find a less costly outfit to fly in the final shipment. Esperanza wasn't able to get the more than 200 trees to the tents until mid-afternoon.

Before then, customers were free to sort through the leftover "table top" trees from Friday that were selling for $55 apiece.

That price was just fine with Thomas Ellis of Wai-pi'o, who arrived with his 8-year-old daughter, Aurora, and what to him seemed like a plausible reason for waiting to the last minute to fetch the family tree.

"Because I am a man," Ellis said.

He also offered an explanation of the level of urgency that can strike a man whose girlfriend has looked him in the eye late in the season and in no uncertain terms slowly said, "Are you going to buy a Christmas tree?"

"You can't even find a fake Christmas tree anywhere now," Ellis said. "The guy at Home Depot told me about this place. If it turned out I couldn't get a tree here, I was actually going to go to Goodwill and see if they had any old fake Christmas trees. And if that failed, I was going to get a big sheet of green paper and have my daughter make a fake tree and hang it on the wall. Seriously."

Lori Davis of 'Ewa Beach considered herself a last-minute tree buyer a week ago when she heard Home Depot in Pearl City was selling 6-foot Christmas trees for $36 and rushed out to buy one.

"By the time I got there, even the needles were gone," she said. "They'd sold out and cleaned up."

Then, daughters Alexis, 7, and Sarah, 13, spotted the Christmas tree sign at Esperanza's tent outlet, and they pulled in and bought a tree that Davis described as "shorter than Alexis." Still, they were back yesterday to pick one more for a friend.

Rudy and Adeline Ortega arrived at the tents after failing to buy a larger tree a couple of weeks ago when they had the chance. Although the two have been married 52 years, Rudy Ortega implied that the marriage might not last if he waited any longer to buy his wife her Christmas tree.

"She wants a tree," he said. "She wants it to smell like Christmas. We're used to the 6-, 7- and 8-footers in California. And then you get this " his voice trailed off as he looked around the tent at trees half that size. In the end, the couple settled on an $80, 4-foot noble fir. The Orange County (Calif.) couple said they couldn't wait to decorate the tree at their son's Hale'iwa home.

Esperanza, who has been in the Christmas tree business since the early 1980s, said he's had years in which he has had to order trees twice or even three times. But this year was his first four-order season.