The Christmas Tree Compost Question

It’s the day before the holiday some people call Christmas, and some who observe this holiday incorporate a tree into the festivities. And some of those celebrants use a technically still-alive tree, even though it’s been sawed off from its stump and transported to their home. Eventually this part of the organism will catch up with its death, ordained in that moment when it was cut off from the oldest part of itself still in the ground, and then the tree will begin to manifest that death physically, in the home of those who brought it to this pass, usually by shedding needles.

Of course most Christmas celebrants will avoid this morbid display by disposing of the tree before it gets too messy. Many localities offer locations where you can mulch your ex-Christmas tree, either allowing the mulch to be used in virtuous maintenance of public lands, or even allowing you to take your mulch home to do with as you see fit. But none of that is the focus of this newsletter, which compels us to ask, can you compost your Christmas tree?

The answer is absolutely yes, in the sense that anything will compost, eventually. But assuming your Christmas tree corpse is the typical conifer model, the challenge is that conifer needles take a while to decay—often even longer than conifer wood. This is because conifer needles come with a waxlike coating that holds them together for a long, long time postmortem. The purpose of this coating in a conifer’s life is to retain moisture and protect against parasites and herbivorous predation. This coating also makes conifer needles (in death) a popular groundcover to prevent unplanned growth.

If you’re the type of person who owns a mulcher or wood chipper capable of dealing with a whole-ass conifer, you’re not likely reading a newsletter about amateur composting. But if you have a Christmas tree you want to compost unmulched, and you don’t want to be picking needles out of your otherwise rich loamy earth product, the best compromise seems to be letting the tree rest outside for a season at least, so it will thoroughly dry out. This should cause most needles to drop off naturally, and most of the rest can be shaken or beaten off. Then dismember your deneedled tree and compost as thou wilt. Happy holidays.

My mother Carolynn Bradley Mohney passed away five years ago this December, and with my father doing the same earlier this year, the family has finally gone through all their accumulated papers and keepsakes. One random bit we found was this slip of medical form, apparently a joke created in 1953 among my mom’s nursing school buddies. The diagnosis for a tonsilectomy and the more medically radical “neckectomy” resulted from clincally determined “mercy killing,” which seems a little backwards to my untrained undertanding of the process of observations leading to conclusions. But they were the professionals, in training at least.

My siblings pointed out that whoever wrote up the card gave my mother the middle name “Mehetible,” more commonly spelled Mehitable or Mehitabel. We have a half-dozen Mehitables in our family tree, though they’re mostly back in the 1700s. By 1953, Mehitable was probably shorthand for a fussy old lady, the kind of name the nursing school girls called my mom as a joke about her advanced years and necessary euthanasia via neckectomy.

It’s also possibly a reference to “Archy and Mehitabel,” a humor serial started in 1916 by Don Marquis for New York’s The Evening Sun newspaper. Archy is a cockroach who writes poetry and stories by jumping around on typewriter keys (so all his writing is in lowercase). Mehitabel is a queeny alley cat and friend/foil/muse to Archy. Since the serial ran for years and was collected and popularly reprinted to 1940 at least, it’s possible my mom and her friends had read it or heard of it, even out in the boonies of Midwestern nursing school.

The series was also illustated by George Herriman, more famous as the creator of Krazy Kat, who Mehitabel somewhat resembles (though she’s much more regally detailed). My mom was a lifelong cat lady, so I think she would be pleased by the comparison.