Eat or clean with your Christmas tree: Five surprising uses for your festive shrub

Before you chuck it outside, here’s some more innovative ideas for your ailing tree. Photo / RNZ / Tracy Neal

The selection boxes are empty, save for the weird medicinal cherry liqueur ones. All that remains of the cheese is a gnarled, off-white crust that may once have been camembert but is now too far gone for anyone to be sure. The last of the Christmas cake sits entombed in a silver foil ball, waiting to be transported to its final resting place. But the Christmas tree endures, doggedly, in the sitting room window.

Slumped to one side like an over-refreshed great-uncle, the colour drained from its needles, its decorations have started to slide from its limp branches. What to do with it, now it has lost its festive promise and serves only as a grim reminder of the impermanence of every living thing?

In approaching this question, those who celebrate Christmas tend to fall into two camps. There are people who bin it all, and vacuum up every last pine needle, the minute the last house guest has departed on New Year’s Day. Then there are the merry malingerers, who insist on observing all 12 days of Christmas and wouldn’t dream of removing the tree until January 6.

Luckily, at whatever point you decide your home should no longer be a mausoleum to Christmas past, there are multiple options for ridding yourself of your now ex-tree. Let us count the ways.

1. Eat it

No, really. If in doubt, How to Eat Your Christmas Tree by food writer and baker Julia Georgallis, is full of recipes for cooking with fir, spruce and pine. Not tempted by her recipe for Christmas tree cured fish? Then why not try boiling the needles with sugar and lemon to make a cordial? The possibilities are, if not endless, then certainly surprising.

Don’t be put off by the subheading, early in the book, that reads: “Is this going to kill me?” Georgallis reassures readers: “If you stick to pine, fir and spruce, no.” But she does warn that cedar and cypress are inedible.

Pine and cleaning go together like salt and pepper.

2. Clean with it

A friend of mine is a deep believer in snipping off some Christmas tree, sticking it in vinegar and cleaning her house with it. The vinegar makes the house smell like a chippie, she says, but the pine makes it smell much fresher. It turns out she is not, in fact, unhinged: a video in which TikTok star Armen Adamjan (@creative_explained) tells us how to create a disinfectant by soaking pine needles in white vinegar has been liked by 1.7 million viewers.

3. Feed it to farm animals

“We give [Christmas trees] to our large animals – the goats, alpacas and sheep,” says Rhiannon Carr from Vauxhall City Farm in south London. “They like chewing on them. They’re grazing animals and the more foliage they have to keep their teeth and stomach working, the better. They get through them pretty quickly, they love it.”

The birds at the farm also love roosting in the branches. “Our smaller aviary birds like to sit on the branches and peck at them with their little beaks,” says Carr.

Vauxhall City Farm won’t be accepting Christmas tree donations this year as it has its own left over from when it sold them before Christmas. But do check out which farms local to you are keen to take them.

The rotting tree fragments support many insects and other wildlife, as well as improving the soil and feeding nearby plants. Photo / Imke Kauta

4. Garden with it

The Royal Horticultural Society offers various ideas on its website. “Simply cut up a Christmas tree into sticks and stack neatly in a shady out-of-the-way part of the garden. The rotting tree fragments support many insects and other wildlife, as well as improving the soil and feeding nearby plants,” writes chief horticulturist Guy Barter. He also recommends using shredded Christmas trees as mulch for shrubs and paths (you can chop the tree with secateurs if you don’t have access to a garden shredder), and creating a “dead hedge”, with Christmas trees as filler.

5. Give it to a park, school or zoo

Pines and Needles offers a Christmas tree removal service in the London area, meaning that for a fee, your tree can become someone else’s problem, while your conscience remains clean.

“We’ll come, we’ll pack everything up, take [the tree] out, cut it up as small as necessary to get it out of the house without causing a massive mess and then we’ll take it back to our facility in Worcester Park where we will chip the trees,” says Veronika Kusak, Pines and Needles’ e-commerce director. “The chippings are divided between local councils, who use it in parks and recreation areas. A few tonnes go to schools, which use it in their grounds, and we donate some to London Zoo for bedding for some of their animals. Anyone who wants some is free to ask.”

Anything that isn’t claimed gets used as biofuel, so everything gets recycled or dealt with in a green way. Meanwhile, you get to celebrate the now-empty space in your home.