What to buy, what to serve, which events to attend — December is typically full of decisions. Here's one more for you to contemplate: What are you going to do with your Christmas tree?
According to the Nature Conservancy, some 10 million live Christmas trees end up in landfills every year. There, they are covered with soil, which results in anaerobic (oxygen-deprived) decomposition rather than the aerobic (oxygen-fueled) process by which they would break down in a natural setting, such as on the forest floor.
Anaerobic decomposition is not only very slow (a tree can take years to break down) but it also generates greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide, which may contaminate groundwater.
If you'd like to avoid this, you have options that not only will avoid harming the environment but may also help improve your garden, and all of them begin with removing ornaments, tinsel or ''flocking'' (spray-on fake ''snow'') from the tree.
Firewood and mulch
At the end of every holiday season, my late husband, John, used to remove our Christmas trees' branches — one by one — using garden pruners right in the living room. As he cut each branch, he would drop it into a large trash bag at his feet.
When the bag was full, I would take it outdoors and distribute the branches throughout the garden to insulate the soil and protect bulbs and perennial root crowns from heaving out of the ground during the freeze-thaw cycles of winter.
Meanwhile, John would get to work sawing the trunk into segments, then would bring them outdoors, where they would cure over winter. After six months of drying, we'd burn the dried wood in our fire pit. Ashes to ashes, as they say.
