Vahana’s Holiday Haven |

This year I took the plunge and purchased a real christmas tree rather than a plastic reproduction one.  Which is the best christmas tree, a real one or a man-made one? From a purely financial point of view the lovely fake Canadian grey spruce we bought in 1985 was a great buy. It still looked OK at Christmas 2009 and has a lot of festive family memories attached to it.  It was starting to look a bit faded though, so we thought we would go for something different this year.

If we had known back then, what we know now about greenhouse gases we would definitely have bought real christmas trees over the years combined with christmas tree delivery to conserve our gas and save the holiday traffic hassles.  Also, if you buy a real tree each year, you don’t have to worry about trying to find somewhere to store the tree in between times.

Yes, believe it or not, real christmas trees are much ‘greener’ in every sense of the word, and you can buy christmas tree varieties such as Noble Fir, Frazer Fir and White Pine online, making it more convenient and easier than ever before.  Anyway.. here comes the science bit.. the majority of Christmas trees are raised on tree farms rather than in wild forests. All those acres of real christmas trees sequester carbon dioxide permanently, even more so during the young trees’ vigorous growth spurts. Since they are a sustainable harvest crop, we do not decrease the amount of CO2 sequestration going on, but rather increase it by making space for new real christmas trees to sequester all that greenhouse gas.

Furthermore I have only just thrown our exquisite Fraser fir tree to the curb after the holidays for it to be composted at the local facility where it is converted back to soil. So all the carbon in my real Christmas tree is now stored in the soil.

With our real Christmas tree delivered fresh and fragrant this year we have had the joy of both Christmas trees for the whole of the holidays and the extra benefit of knowing it hasn’t cost the Earth.