Have you considered your carbon footprint during the festive season?

There is hardly a supermarket or shop that hasn’t informed me by now of the price of my Christmas turkey if bought from them or the discounted toys I can buy now rather than waiting for another month.

Even a few exotic brochures have arrived so I may start doing the Lottery now to be able to afford what is in them.

It’s the time of the year when I really do have a lot of other things on my mind and I could do without this early Christmas junk mail, which has to be disposed of somehow.

I’m so glad I have no little ones living with me as they would be pouring over all this stuff thinking Christmas is coming the next week.

There are some in-between brochures trying to persuade me how to do up my bathroom for all those Christmas guests – really – and the pet-shop ones suggesting what my four legged pets might like from Santa.

That was a sore one since my beloved dog is no longer in this world and the two cats are too old to be too bothered faffing around with tinsel on their beds.

Then there was Which? the consumer group advising `environmentalists to rent or grow their own Christmas tree as both plastic and real trees should be on the no-go list for the climate conscious’.

Now I have every respect for Which?

But to grow your own tree would take a week or two if not anything up to five years and even more.

I know this because my last home was close to a forest and it was always interesting to watch how quickly the trees did grow though a decent sized one would take five years at least.

We knew too that thieves had a habit of making off, usually in the dead of night, with a van load of them to add to their own Christmas funds and party time habits.

Now it’s mightily, if not totally impossible, to protect a forest of trees of all sizes from thieves and robbers but to make a point my dog walking companion in those days would help me tie some tinsel and decorations on a tree where the visitors parked their cars.

I do this just to make the point that it was much nicer to highlight a tree there that others could enjoy rather than dig it up and sell it for a few pounds and be lost for ever.

Each of those years our selected tree appeared to enjoy being decorated, most likely because it knew we wouldn’t damage it or cause it any harm.

Thinking about it now I’m sure the save-the-plant brigade would have been pleased at our example though we endeavoured every one of those decorating events to not reveal who was daft enough to decorate a tree in the middle of nowhere.

I’ve never been one to decorate a tree outside our home as I know I would have hated watching it being battered leaving the decorations shredded by wind or buried in snow as it was on one occasions.

Now there is nothing wrong with plastic trees – I’ve been tempted the odd year – but they do not have the aroma of the real thing and once stripped of their decorations and put in the attic or outside shed it never looks the same the following year.

Yes I could start growing my own but it’s doubtful if they would be big enough this side of my 80th birthday.

Plastic trees are, in many ways, much easier to decorate and they won’t leave you pierced fingers.

But I’ve never goten away from the real McCoy even when I now know it will deprive the earth of a certain amount of oxygen when it’s disposed of and even before that it will have to be transported from whatever corner of Europe we get our trees from producing pollution as it is transported.

So, this year, I am pondering what to do.

The world needs its trees so we can’t forever keep cutting them down.

But we can grow and re-use, maybe not this year but in future.

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