Placed in these terms (500 weeks growth for use lasting a handful of weeks) it is clear the Christmas tree industry has one of the longer production/consumption ratios. Four legged animals like pigs and cows are usually slaughtered within a few years. Most two legged fowl like chickens and ducks will be born and eaten in under a year. Vegetables are harvested within a few weeks from germination. Flowers and grain crops take even less time.

As well as taking so long to produce Christmas trees are environmentally pricey in other regards. 

Beheaded roots remain stuck in the ground. The helpful news is they rot and eventually convert to nutrients. The bad news is that can take a decade. That is as long as it took to grow in the first place. Meanwhile the stumps in the ground look dreadful. It's only an aesthetic and personal point, admittedly, but this is a conspicuous ugliness around Christmas tree farms. 

Carbon dioxide chomping ability dies with the tree. Here’s a striking statistic: every hectare of living Christmas trees cleans approximately 25,000 kilograms of pollutants from the air annually. That’s the same as several dozen cars. Given that America consumes more than thirty million Christmas trees annually – Europe overall is not far behind – that means billions of kilograms of pollutants cannot be cleaned from the air.

The squander in Christmas trees continues with the demise of the tree. Most Christmas trees by early January look like gangly sticks of famine rather than the beauties they were in late November. Most are discarded via the domestic rubbish system. Eventually these end up on landfills and not back in the forests where nature might have made better use of their nutrients.

So what to do?

(1) Borrow Christmas trees that are still alive (ie, with a root ball)
Taking something from the garden, or a forest, complete with a root-ball and then putting it back later can be quite good fun. A bit of work, yes. But if you have kids and a suitable tree then they get to grow with the re-planted tree. As youngsters the tree might be less than a metre. By the time they are adults with kids of their own it could be ten or more metres. Too tall for indoors but still a great and living treasure full of memories – and source of seeds for the future. 

(2) Pulp harvested Christmas trees for fertiliser
If borrowing trees is a non-flier, and you still prefer a fresh cut tree, then afterwards make sure it is pulped. If you have a machine at home, great. Use the chippings in your garden. Or put the tree into local programmes that pulp trees. The carbon-cleaning energy created by the tree will not have been entirely wasted. 

(3) Consider less harmful fake trees
Wooden trees are available these days. By this I mean treated wood made into planks and the like and then re-designed into look-alike trees. They last longer than traditional fakes and use fewer harmful chemicals in manufacturing. Some of them are even vaguely arty. Well, that's probably too generous. But at least they look quite distinctive and better than the Made-in-China tinsel and colourful lighting jobs. Also the wood is often from replenishable forests. 

Standing back from how we handle Christmas trees though, living or dead, it's worth asking a bigger question about the whole idea of putting trees in our houses for a few weeks each year. Just how much do we respect Germany? Christmas trees, let us not forget, are an industrial-age German tradition. They are no older than that. If Queen Victoria had not married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha there would probably be no significant Christmas tree tradition in Victorian Britain. Prince Albert considered the tradition of trees indoors over Christmas as one of the finer German imports to Britain. The British hoi polloi followed, then the Dominions and America, then the British Empire. 

Chez Dalbrack, so you know, is this year featuring a Chinese juniper tree (Juniperus chinensis). The tree is a tad small at a metre or so but it will survive back in the garden in January along with a few memories.