Hundreds of trashed dead Christmas pagan trees, 2025

Every year, I take pictures of how people trash their trees. I find the waste and death tragic and the images of something that was supposed to celebrate life become garbage. This season, I started seeing trees trashed before Christmas: Ten days before Christmas people are already throwing away their Christmas pagan trees.

I call them “Christmas pagan trees” because, as I’ve written before, people in the U.S. celebrate Jesus’s birth with ritual of pagan origin. They celebrate something that happened in Bethlehem with chopping down fir trees. This tradition seems to have begun in northern Europe, not the middle east.

I propose instead of celebrating birth with death and mixing paganism in with Christianity, recognizing that cutting down trees was not likely ever appropriate, but not now.

Look at this mess. We don’t have to keep trashing the environment just because we used to. Can you show your love for your savior in more life-affirming ways? You don’t need a dead tree to spend time with family.

This tradition once started. We can start new ones—life-affirming ones. Here is what will happen to your tree within a month if you buy one. Can you think of something better?

And now, the dead, trashed Christmas pagan trees

By the way, I don’t go out of my way to find the trees. I only take pictures of trees I pass in the course of my regular walking around. You’ll see hundreds of pictures below, but my total time taking pictures was probably about a minute or two. This post took less time than most.

I presume there are hundreds of millions more killed and trashed across the country. Wouldn’t it be great to reduce the number of trashed, dead trees to zero, replaced with a life-affirming, life-creating tradition?