Through the year we worship trees — we delight in the veterans, promise to plant more, weep at the forest fires and denuded Amazon. And come December, how do we show our gratitude? By sacrificing a conifer.

The chainsaw whirrs, the felled baby Nordmann and 7ft spruces are chucked on to trucks on their way to our homes, to be covered in trinkets and baubles. They will desiccate gently until that day in January when the council wagon comes around to collect them.

Is it now an act of barbarism against nature? Just relax, thinks Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees: nowadays it’s only as bad as a market gardener picking sprouts.

Though the tradition of bringing greenery into the home probably began before the birth of Christ, celebrating Christmas with a tree was closely allied to the Reformation. It is an alternative to the Catholic crib. Legend has it that Martin Luther was the first person to put candles on his tree.

But the act of tree-hauling was already not without controversy. The German city of Freiburg had one of the first reported ceremonial trees in 1419 — decorated with gingerbread and waffles, erected by a local bakers’ guild. In 1554, Freiburg banned the cutting of trees for Christmas. Strasbourg had already banned cutting pine branches, brought in for New Year. In Alsace, a limit was imposed — each citizen could only cut “one pine in the length of eight shoes”.

However, the idea of a tree in the house in the dark days of winter, lit and worshipped, persisted. It began to spread through England first under George I, from the House of Hanover. In 1848, The Illustrated London News ran a picture of the Queen and family around a Christmas tree.

Carl August Schwerdgeburth included an engraving of Martin Luther with his family around the candlelit tree for an 1843 children’s book. The idea became imprinted in the minds of the public and as Lutherans settled in the US, it travelled with bells on.

‘Luther in the circle of his family at Wittenberg am Christabend 1536’, steel engraving by Carl August Schwerdgeburth (1843) © akg-images

The tree would appear in the 1947 classic Miracle on 34th Street, be trimmed and fussed over in Christmas in Connecticut (1945). The final scene of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, released in 1946, is played out around the Christmas tree as a symbol of giving: the town storms into George Bailey’s house to do the reverse of a bank-run, filling up the coffers of his Building and Loan company with one-dollar bills to a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne”. And then a bell hanging from it rings and Clarence gets his wings.

By this point, every self-respecting postwar US household has seen a Christmas tree on celluloid, and their own living rooms come to reflect them. But how then do you provide enough firs for a continent, swaths of which are close to desert?

While there are still traditions of cutting a tree from a national forest, most trees are now farmed. For that reason, Wohlleben, the guru of natural forestry, does not see this as an issue against nature. “You could see them as a kind of vegetable that can be consumed without a guilty conscience,” he said in a podcast in 2019, a view he confirms he still holds when I asked him this week. His family still get a tree in.

In Ashe County, North Carolina, it’s an industry. Of the 11.65m trees cropped and sold in 2019, and logged in NSDAA records, Ashe County — population 26,863 — produced nearly 2m alone, 5,000 hectares of hungry young trees suckling on carbon dioxide. It specialises in the Appalachian’s native Fraser firs — soft needles and a silvery sheen.

(Driving a pick-up to go collect the tree might negate some of the benefits to your conscience. A Christmas tree stores around 18kg of carbon dioxide, in roots and above the ground. A 15-mile round trip in a Toyota Hilux to collect one will emit 10kg in return.)

The Christmas tree is central to the classic film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ © LMK Media

Even so, in an age of anxiety about consumption and waste, having welcomed a tree into your house, how to accept its demise four or five weeks later? This question has led to a new branch of the Christmas tree business: “tree rentals” — ones that you return to nature.

Monica Hudson has been running Rent a Living Christmas Tree in Carmel, California, since 2009. As well as traditional firs, she’s also trying to raise mini-Redwoods. Her customers “would happily keep the tree”, she says “but it’s difficult when you live in an apartment or don’t have a big property.”

Up on Rodborough Common near Stroud in the west of England, Tom Vear started his Rental Christmas Trees business from the yard beside his family’s ice-cream parlour, Winstone’s, in 2017. The process there is simple. “You pick the tree you want, you love the tree, you give it a name — Bruce the Spruce,” says Vear.

It comes potted with watering instructions and hopes for the best. “Then you bring it back and we offer a re-rent of the same tree the next year.” Between January and November, the potted tree is returned to a growing site near Cheltenham, about 10 miles away, to fatten out and add another foot in height. He already has orders for 2022.

Are rental trees any better for the environment? It is most likely marginal, and again based on distance travelled. Vear tells me he had a call from Edinburgh, 350 miles away, asking for a rental to be couriered there. He refused. Perhaps the greatest benefit of the rental model are the wider lessons of returning them in January — that not everything needs to be owned: an antidote to all those unreturnable presents under the tree.

Another alternative is the artificial tree, made of a cocktail of plastic and metal. Although one should be instinctively against them, the Carbon Trust says they aren’t so bad if you can bear to keep them for at least seven and preferably 20 years. An artificial tree will have an average carbon footprint of 40kg, about 10 times that of a real tree that will eventually be chipped.

The original way was perhaps the most in tune with nature: man takes axe and saw out into the woods, slays a pine and brings it home — within sustainable limits. In the US, national forests issue a permit and a small fee is payable. In Estonia, you find your tree in a state forest — one that is unlikely to make it to maturity — tell the government via an app and they send you the price. Generally speaking, cutting down trees anywhere without permission is illegal.

However, those expecting the plump conical bushes seen in garden centres, straight from the farms, might not appreciate the forest tree: windblown so it’s asymmetrical, yellow around the edges from lack of fertiliser, a little ropey.

An example of the waywardness of forest trees can be seen in the one recently delivered to Trafalgar Square in London from Oslo, a historic gift of friendship. The first London tree was sent in 1947 by King Haakon VII as a thank you after the city housed him during the second world war.

Now it is more a tree of “love and solidarity”, says Marianne Borgen, the mayor of Oslo, who observed the tree being felled by foresters — they nurture 10 per year and then choose the best. “They take such good care of these trees, I also think sometimes they sing to them and read them poetry,” says Borgen.

Unveiled in the first week in December, this year’s tree is a little gappy and lopsided. “Even Norway hates us now,” one wit tweeted in what has become the new Christmas tradition: being rude about the Trafalgar Square tree. Another chipped in: “Interflora clearly forgot to include the little sachet of plant feed.”

“There were some criticisms in London,” says Borgen. “This is a tree from the woods, not a specially grown tree, nor a plastic one. Real trees look different,” she says. But the real criticism again should not be of natural form — our own Highland spruces would do little better — but of the transport — truck, boat, truck — to get it to London.

The rival to London’s tree, the Rockefeller in New York, is also up. They don’t put up with such jibes from the public — they glue in extra branches to fill up the gaps.

However grand the tree, it shares a fate with many of the others: it will be chipped and used for compost when its time is over, says the City of Westminster, which also runs a “recycling scheme” for domestic trees.

If the environment is your concern, this is where there is a key difference. A tree dumped into a landfill will decompose without air — anaerobically — releasing methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. One that is chipped down (with an, ahem, powerful engine) and composted will largely just release the CO2 that the next generation of trees would absorb.

Of course, it is possible to just do this yourself, clipping off the branches and making a mound of them in a corner of the garden — a nice hotel for bugs and beetles as it decays, and much like the end of a tree’s life in a forest.

Or you could look at your Christmas tree as the beginning of new things: a meal, a cocktail, the giver of flavour. Julia Georgallis is the author of How to Eat Your Christmas Tree. A baker by trade, she was running supper clubs and thinking about “cradle to grave” uses for produce.

“In January, you see all those trees on the side of the street and they look so sad, so I thought: how do we reuse them and make January a little happier,” she says.

The recipes include pickles and a Christmas tree fish dish where you whizz up the needles with lemon, beetroot, salt and sugar.

Not all trees taste the same: “Fir is zesty, pine is mild and good for teas, spruce is quite vanilla-y. I did some research into why and found that in synthetic vanilla there’s an ingredient called coniferin which can be derived from conifers — it’s a flavour note they share,” says Georgallis, who sources trees for cooking from leftover stock at a local Christmas tree farm that doesn’t use pesticides.

Other uses are syrups — the book includes recipes for a Christmas tree sour and mimosa and a syrup that can be added to just about any spirit after boiling up the needles with some sugar. Georgallis reminds me that retsina gets its flavour from pine resin aromas.

Is the sacrifice of a tree worth it? The most environmentally friendly fir is one that stays put in the ground where it seeded. But, failing that, the tree world would probably forgive us our offerings if we gave the natural forests more space to grow; if every time a bell rang, a seedling landed safely.

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