Imagine walking into your house during holiday season. There is snow drifting and twirling to rest on the soft ground and to escape from the biting cold, you walk in the door, feeling the warm burst of air prance among your face. In the corner of your mind, there is a faint scent of holiday lingering in the air, filled with Christmas, joy, and a dash of the delicate aroma of the desired evergreen. It starts to get dark and you come home from the cold; you sit by the fire with hot chocolate and watch a Christmas special along with the outstanding, majestic Christmas tree keeping you company by your side. Christmas music is playing with its upbeat tempo that always engraves its tune in your mind. It is the only time of year that your family gathers around the Christmas tree and can all be full of cheer and merriness. Finally, you can celebrate this universal holiday that you waited for since January. What if all of this never existed? What if there was no Christmas tree to provide the grand, magnificent environment and contribute to the holiday spirit? What would you do if it was replaced by a lump of plastic and metal shedding plastic leaves all over the ground?

Many Americans and people around the world celebrate Christmas, with about 70% of Americans using fake Christmas tree. I believe people should use real trees, not fake trees to help the environment and follow the tradition of Christianity. Most think that they are killing trees every Christmas, but this statement is fictitious. Christmas trees are grown on farms like any other crop. What would you say if someone told you that you could not eat vegetables anymore? I would be extremely shocked and that is my reaction when people tell me that I should not use a real tree, because they hurt the environment. Approximately, 31.3 million trees are cut down every year, but farmers make up for the chopped down trees by replanting two or three seedlings for each tree harvested. Trees are a renewable, recyclable natural product grown on a farm and give a fresh scent that artificial trees cannot.

Real Christmas trees benefit the environment by taking in carbon dioxide and other harmful greenhouse gases and releasing fresh oxygen into the air. They take carbon dioxide out of the air to produce wood, starch, and sugar, reducing the amount of carbon in the air to help prevent changes to our climate. On the contrary, artificial trees are genuinely harmful to the environment when compared to real trees. They generate 48.3 kilograms of greenhouse gases when real trees only generate 3.1 kilograms of greenhouse gases. A person would have to use a fake tree for twenty years to leave the same environmental footprint as a natural tree does, but fake trees, on average, only last about six years. Another undesired quality of fake trees is that most of the time, the fake trees come from China or somewhere else abroad, so there is no advantage to our home economy. Also, time is required to assemble and disassemble the Christmas tree when holiday season comes around and the bulky container requires storage space. Artificial Christmas trees definitely are not a good replacement for genuine ones that are beneficial to the environment.

Artificial trees often contain dangerous materials that can be a risk to the health of the environment and young children. Many fake trees are made in China and contain lead and PVC. According to Frank Lowenstein, the director of climate adaptation for The Nature Conservancy, “It uses a lot more fossil fuels and releases a lot more carbon pollution to make a fake tree. Most electricity that is being used to melt that plastic is coming from coal-fire powered plants, which are among the most polluting, in terms of releasing carbon”. Artificial trees produce fossil fuels and require the result of pollution to manufacture, proving that owning these trees is not worth the impact to the environment they produce. Lead is a carcinogen, a substance directly involved in causing cancer, and plastic takes a long time to degrade, especially PVC. If a young child comes in contact with a fake Christmas tree, and inserts the chemicals into their mouth, whether it be directly or indirectly, it could cause serious problems. Since they are made out of petroleum, unauthentic trees contain another non-renewable resource. Fake trees are non-renewable, non-biodegradable, and have dangerous contents.

Using Christmas trees is a tradition of America and Christianity, and we should not break this practice by substituting them with clumps of plastic and metal fused together. Germans started using the tree as part of their Christian Christmas over 400 years ago to show hope in the forthcoming spring. Using trees as part of the celebration was brought over to the United States of America by Hessian armies when they were paid to battle for the British during the Revolutionary War and when German immigrants came to Pennsylvania and Ohio. By 1900, one in five American families used Christmas trees and by 1930, using Christmas trees became a universal part of American Christmas. When people choose a Christmas tree, they have two choices: a renewable, recyclable natural product grown on a farm or a non-renewable, non-biodegradable plastic and metal product made in a Chinese factory.

Although fake trees are improving over time, becoming easier to assemble and coming with lights, I believe the authentic option still has many more benefits. We could make a great difference in the world if people switched back to using natural trees. Christmas trees are a dying tradition with over half of America’s population using fake trees. People and society are changing, supplies and pricing have adjusted over the years, and competition has been increasing, influencing people’s decisions to purchase artificial trees. There are about 2.1 billion Christians in the world, which is about a third of the world’s population, and many other people celebrate Christmas, who do not consider themselves Christian. With this substantial fraction of the world participating in any event, they could make drastic changes to the natural world. If all the people used a real tree, the environment would be much healthier with less greenhouse gases and less dangerous chemicals. Also, Earth would be a much safer place to live for young children. The world would be a better place to live and appreciate if people would make the effort to get out, buy a tree, and recycle it every year instead of buying a fake tree every six years.