Dragging my feet to put up the Christmas tree so why not procrastinate and make a GoA poll?
Usual holiday tree type:
- Real tree
- Artificial tree
- $42x in my pocket, no tree for me
0 voters
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were you inspired by the paywalled article?
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Is this for what we prefer, or what we have?
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I got a fake one because of environmental concerns (9footer).
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We get a real tree, because a fake tree is a non-starter for my husband. It’s nice, but if I ever had to put it up or take it down, it would not be my preference.
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Can you expand on this? Because everything I’ve ever heard on the subject is that fake trees are worse for the environment.
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We do compost most of our tree, so I feel good about that. We will burn some of it in our solo stove, but that’s firewood we would have burned either way, and we don’t have to go buy other firewood as a result.
It smells very nice and doesn’t require storage space - plus for us in our century home.
We support a small local business every year - perk.
The tree gets many years of contributing to cleaner air before it’s cut, I like that.
We have a family tradition where we all pick out ornaments at the same time we get our tree. Our tree is now filled with so many ornaments from the years, from our family and past foster kids. So looking at our tree fills me with many memories, good and bittersweet ones. I suppose we would have that either way, but it’s all packaged in one event every year and I like that.
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I put Christmas Tree window stickers on my patio door.
So I guess put me down for fake.
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You can reuse a fake tree for many years.
My thinking is that if you have one for 5+ years in a more urban area it should be ok in terms of carbon footprint. If too many people in an urban area buy real trees you will probably have issues.
So this really depends on where you live (if you live rurally & right beside a big forest area and can cut down your own tree thats probably the optimal way to go if you replant every year).
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You CAN reuse them for many years, but do most people? I think that’s probably the key. I remember reading a while ago that a fake tree needs to be reused close to a decade to be the better choice - which seems like a long time. Or maybe the people I know are just super lazy and like spending money on the newest, nicest looking fake trees every couple years, which is quite likely.
The fake/real tree debate wrt environmentalism is probably a lot like the plastic straw debate - every little thing helps, but straws aren’t the problem, not even close. Fake trees in landfills aren’t the reason our planet is suffocating.
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I love the smell of a real tree, but allergies have made artificial our go to. Probably have had the artificial tree 10 years so far.
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Inspiration was putting up my real tree and someone else talking about putting up their artificial one.
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Another issue with real trees is that it can be problematic for pets (cats/dogs). They can eat the needles that fall off the tree and this can cause gastrointestinal problems.
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We have fake trees (two: one for the high foyer, one for presents). I don’t have to go find a place to buy a tree, pick out the tree, buy it, put it in my car (wagon) and have sap all over my car, drag it into the house, set it up, water it frequently, then drag it out to the curb at the end.
What I do is simple heavy lifting (dragging) and putting them together, then put them back into the box that is now somehow smaller than it was a few weeks earlier.
Get a new one (or two) every ten years or so.
I don’t really care. Trust me when I say I will reuse it until the lights won’t work. And even then, I will hang lights on it one last year, so we get a better deal post-Christmas.
Now, the old-fashioned ones where each branch had to be inserted, eff-no. Mine are three or four parts, easily labeled. takes less than an hour total.
I have a tree farm less than a mile away. I don’t care.
The alternative for me is no tree at all. Humbug!
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We’ve had ours about 10 years - it’s shiny silver and weaselette loves it. Always had real trees growing up. I miss going out and cutting our own, but that’s not an option where we live anyway. I don’t miss the mess and maintenance of the real tree.
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Makes me think of the Charlie Brown Christmas show.
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Pretty much every year since we’ve had our own household we have spent 2 weeks not at our house during Christmas. A real tree seems like it would be a bad idea.
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I know there’s a Radiohead joke in here somewhere.
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We do the fake tree. I’m cursing it this year, a few years back we bought a new one to replace one that was ~15 years old, and I got one with lights already on it. After a few years, about half of the lights stopped working and I couldn’t diagnose it, so we just added a string of lights. This year, only about 10% of the lights are working.
I wanted to toss it and buy a nicer one but the wife just threw some lights on it and said it’s fine.
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