Matthew Quinn’s Tree Farm in Cornville. Photo by Matt Quinn

It’s Christmas tree season. I love it.

To some it may seem like a waste to cut down a perfectly healthy fir tree in its botanical youth, haul it hundreds of miles so someone can buy it, take it home, and bring it indoors for a few weeks before tossing it in the trash. But beyond the joy they bring to many people, those trees do a lot of good in their relatively short lives.

Matthew Quinn of Cornville, vice president and soon-to-be-installed president of the Maine Christmas Tree Association, said many people who oppose the use of live Christmas trees are under the (false) impression they are taken from a forest, which would be damaged by the loss of young trees.

“We are harvesting a crop, just like corn or hay fields,” Quinn explained. “The only difference is that our crop takes seven to 10 years to mature.”

The farmland where Christmas trees grow supports many kinds of wildlife. Field mice often hang out near the trees looking for food, and those mice are an important step in the food chain for other wildlife; they’re eaten by owls, hawks, skunks and snakes. Chipmunks and squirrels live among maturing Christmas trees, and in the spring and summer, song birds build their nests and raise their nestlings in the trees.

“It’s considered good luck if you find a bird’s nest in the tree you choose to cut,” Quinn said.

Quinn added that growing Christmas trees help people survive. “One acre of Christmas trees provide enough oxygen each day to keep 18 people alive,” he said.

The trees continue to provide benefits even after people have decorated them, enjoyed the holidays, taken them down and disposed of them. Many of the spent Christmas trees are collected by municipalities and eventually ground up and turned into compost, which, in turn, when used in a garden, improves the ability of soil to retain moisture.

The way needles and small branches grab onto other materials, Quinn noted, makes them valuable for putting on beaches to prevent erosion during hurricanes and other storms as well as the dangerously high tides caused by climate change.

Christmas tree farms provide work, too, albeit mostly seasonal work. Most of these seasonal workers have other full-time jobs, but the farm job provides extra income, Quinn said. The work includes tipping trees, in which branches are cut back or entire trees are sheared. The material removed from the tipped trees is used for wreathes and other decorations. After these trees have grown back, they are cut down for use as Christmas trees.

Ben and Molly’s Christmas Tree Farm in South China last holiday season. Christmas trees are a crop, like corn or hay, says Matthew Quinn, incoming president of the Maine Christmas Tree Association, and they offer many benefits to wildlife and humans. Anna Chadwick/Morning Sentinel

For all of those reasons and for more personal ones, my wife Nancy and I have always bought locally grown Christmas trees sold by local businesses or nonprofit organizations.

Quinn admits that farming Christmas trees has some environmental impacts. Farmers use tractors in the field and ship trees by truck. But even if the trees are imported from as far as Canada, they do far less damage than the plastic and metal fake trees that are imported from overseas.

Nancy and I love our local Christmas trees. If tradition holds this year, we will buy one the week after Thanksgiving. For several years, we had two Christmas trees: a big cut one in the family room and a potted, live one in the living room, which we would later plant in our garden. We gave the live tree up because it took a great deal of time.

First, you need to dig a very big hole before the ground freezes for the spot where you plan to plant it. Once you buy the potted or balled-and-burlaped tree and bring it home, it can stay inside for only three or four days. The room where you put it must be kept cool, and you must water the tree. If it gets too warm, it will break dormancy. If it gets too dry, it will be damaged. After Christmas, on what always seemed to be the coldest, windiest day of December, you have to get it back outside and plant it in the waiting hole.

Those living trees can grow really big. After planting six of them, we could never figure out where to put any more in our yard. Then two died because the spot I’d chosen for them was too shady. We planted the other four at the edge of our vegetable garden. I used to put lights on them at Christmastime until they became so tall it was dangerous to do the work from a step ladder.

A few years back, we cut one of the remaining four down, thinking we could use the top as our indoor Christmas tree that year. But by then, the tree had been growing so long it turned out the trunk, even near the tree top, was too thick to fit into our tree stand. Instead, we used the greens for wreathes and other decorations.

The three remaining trees are now crowding each other out. Another will have to be cut down within a year. We will definitely time it so that we, as well as members of the Cape Elizabeth Garden Club and other friends, will be able to use the greens for their Christmas decorations.

Tom Atwell is a freelance writer gardening in Cape Elizabeth. He can be contacted at: tomatwell@me.com.