Needling the Royals?

Courier Countryside Column for 17 January 2014

FIR AULD LANG SYNE?

One of the saddest sights at the start of the year is discarded Christmas trees.

In towns they pile up on street corners or in parks awaiting removal. In rural areas they are left out with the rubbish.

Without being overly sentimental, the tree that was lovingly bought, painstakingly decorated, and served as a centerpiece for the celebrations, nestling presents for excited children, is now chucked out with hardly a second thought. (Except, perhaps for the inconvenience of needles showering the carpet as the corpse is eased out of the door.)

What offends me is that that we’ve condemned these attractive trees to die just for a few short weeks of visual pleasure. Yes, I KNOW they probably wouldn’t have been grown in the first place unless there was the seasonal demand. And it all provides employment for nurserymen and wholesalers and retailers. But trees are meant to be outside. Why on earth do we want to cut them down in their prime and bring them indoors?

Apparently it’s all the fault of Prince Albert. In 1841, he brought a fir tree from Germany, decorated it in Windsor Castle and had illustrations of the Royal Family posing by it published in newspapers.

The original­ - and marginally more sensible - tradition was to decorate a tree growing outside in order to entice the tree spirits back to provide new growth in the spring.

So how did we get from that to today’s practice of condemning the tree to death by cutting it off at the stem and bringing it into the living room?

I suppose that’s my main gripe. ‘When I were a lad’, Christmas trees came with roots. I remember my dad replanting ours on Twelfth Night. The next year we’d troop down to the bottom of the garden and ceremoniously dig it up again. But commercial growers, realising the economic advantage of flogging us a new one at exorbitant prices each year, started to cut the roots too small to replant, or boiling them to death, before eventually selling them without roots at all.

A couple of weeks after Christmas I saw a woman taking a small tree out of her car. I jokingly suggested she’d got her seasons mixed up. “Oh, no”, she said. “I’m taking it to the allotment to replant.” So it can still be done. Next winter let’s try not to slaughter the innocents!