– Christine Gelley, Agriculture and Natural Resources Educator, Noble County OSU Extension
Have you decided what to do with your tree?
We’ve made it to the last week of the year 2025. What a year! Another magnificent testimony of the influence of persistent people who make the most of what they have and share it with others they meet along the way.
There is no doubt that each person reading this column could make a list of joys and sorrows that 2025 brought our way. Without the sorrow, we wouldn’t know joy. Without joy, we wouldn’t recognize sorrow. Both are pivotal in shaping who we are as individuals and as a community. We should celebrate our joys together. We should feel our sorrows together. How blessed we are to be a part of a community that does just that.
Thank you, Noble County and all of Ohio, for being a supportive community through whatever comes our way! I am excited to see what we will experience together in 2026.
Before we jump ahead into the New Year, I have gathered together some suggestions for ways to close out year, while remaining festive!
Here are some ideas of what to do with your Christmas tree now that Christmas Day has passed.
You could leave it up! It’s your house. You make the rules. It was a lot of work to bring a tree inside, set it up, decorate it, and keep it watered, why not keep it up for the whole 12-Days of Christmas? That’s right, historically, the 12-Days of Christmas BEGIN on Christmas Day and end on January 6, which is Epiphany- the day that honors when the wise men found Jesus and brought him gifts.
In many cultures, including much of Appalachia, Christmas has been celebrated all 12 days and gifts were exchanged on January 6. The push to celebrate Christmas on December 25 is quite new and driven by commercialism and stress to make you feel like you have to function on the same timeline as everyone else and that stress compounds, triggering you to buy and spend more to keep up with society.
Fight the patriarchy of celebrating one day of Christmas. Leave your tree. Buy clearance gifts after everyone else finishes shopping. Make Christmas cookies on December 29. Celebrate whenever you want. Bonus points to you if you get a dug tree that will stay alive for years to come and become a part of your landscape indefinitely! Leave it up, in the yard, all year long!
If you have a cut tree, this advice applies until the tree actually shows signs of dying… then you should probably take the decorations off and move it outside. A dry tree is a fire risk and leaves a blanket of needles in its wake.
“O’ Christmas tree, O’ Christmas tree, how lovely were your branches? They once were green and plump and neat, but now they are poking my feet. O’ Christmas tree, O’ Christmas tree, it’s time to move your branches.” – Christine Gelley
A Christmas tree is an excellent thing to recycle. Christmas trees can be donated to become wildlife habitat (more details available online at https://ohiodnr.gov/home) or you can incorporate them as wildlife habitat yourself! At home, we move our Christmas tree to the backyard, visible from our biggest window, secure it to a fence post, and decorate it with treats for the birds! We string popcorn, cranberries, and oranges on cotton thread and hang them on the tree. We make bird seed ornaments shaped with cookie cutters to feed our feathered friends. When winter ends, we add the Christmas tree to our first campfire of the new year, and it warms our hearts again.
You could saw disks from the tree trunk/branches to make ornaments for next year or coasters or a game. Dry wood can easily be used for arts and crafts and sealed in a transparent coating to keep it from being sticky. Just think, people buy wood disks for crafts. You have a source right at your fingertips already! Saw them up and post them online for sale. Diversifying your farm income stream is a great way to protect against market fluctuations in the coming year, you know.
Or, simply put your tree out at the curb on the days that landscaping material is collected and it should make its way into mulch or compost to give back to the soil in landscapes around the community.
For the readers with artificial trees or no trees at all, I respect your decision to not bring the outdoors in for the holidays. I hope your transition to the next season is smooth and that your tree fits into storage without drama. But, are you sure you don’t want a real Christmas Tree next year?
I hope you have found this advice amusing and practical. We wish all our readers joyful season’s greetings and many blessings for the New Year ahead!
Talk to you next year!