Happy Sustainable Holidays - from a Christmas Tree Hugger

Posted on | December 31, 2008 |

by Penelope Stockinger

I believe I have become a Christmas tree hugger. As your editor, I am not sure if this really has to do with marketing, or marketing to women, but I am a woman and a marketer and the subject touched me this year more than most. I am not sure if it was less demand due to depressed holiday spending or an oversupply of Christmas tree vendors, but around where I live - in California - come Christmas Eve, the tree lots were still FULL of trees - beautiful trees from the giant to the small, the perfect to the not-so-perfect. I don’t think the lots I saw were in any way exceptional to elsewhere in the country. With our ever-expanding collective green conscious (I not only live in California, but I live near Berkeley - the epicenter of all things tree-huggy), the site of all these trees made me very sad and I had to ask myself again as I do every year “what happens to these trees after Christmas?”

I asked the man selling trees at the local Longs Drugs, who, in his big burly way said “Well I’ll tell ya’ what I told the last guy who asked me that question, I don’t know and I don’t care” - I quickly imagined him bound and tied and lying in the local dump next to the beautiful discarded Douglas Fir which he did not care about - but I kept my mouth shut. I vowed to research the matter a bit more.

A search or two online revealed very little on the fate of “unsold Christmas trees”. The information I did get suggested that they meet various fates, from being recycled into mulch, to ending in the local dump. Sarah Tarver-Wahlquist, writing for Balanced Living Magazine, tells us not to despair, as these trees are “farmed” anyway, and most growers used sustainable practices and planted 2 new trees for every one which was chopped down. Somehow, I still don’t feel any better. One writer from Germany mirrored my own probably far too sentimental feelings. Before I started buying potted trees, I was always the one who bought the skinny, “ugly” Charlie Brown tree so that at least it would have a “home” for Christmas. Now I buy the skinny potted variety, (and you now know far too much about me).

Somehow, whether recycled, farmed or just plain dumped, the blatant oversupply of these lovely green trees seemed to be another holiday eyesore - like all the Christmas shopping mayhem that takes us so far from the real meaning of the holidays - friends, family - and hey what about religion?

But the end may not be near for the Christmas tree hugger. Today, as I went to the bank before they closed at noon, I chanced upon something “green” and really uplifting. The property manager of a certain downtown business location, opted this year to be “green” when choosing the holiday decorations for his building’s rather sizable lobby - with potted trees. I stopped and asked the large group of building guards hovering around the front desk about the genesis of this choice of floral design, and was told that this was the personal choice of the building owner not to waste the 15-20’ trees normally required to decorate such an expanse. He wanted to do his part and be green, and that they [at the front desk] had been flooded with compliments and sentiments just like mine. This was really good news. I hope in future that we have perhaps more “potted” lots, and fewer dead trees in the local dumps.

And my tree this year - why potted naturally. Here, i’ll share the “greenery” from downtown. There were no less than seven lovely ‘arrangements” around the lobby like this one.
Happy New Year - may 2009 be far less gloomy than all my marketing journals are suggesting. And may consumers everywhere learn to spend for sustainability and value.