What to do with Christmas tree in Tallinn
After Christmas and New Year's Day were gone, the question arose what to do with the Christmas tree. This was somewhat new problem for me, being a country girl, as at my parents' home we always burned our Christmas tree and I had never had a Christmas tree in the city before. So last Friday I started to investigate the options, as our Christmas tree looked more and more funny with losing its needles. Especially so after our 5 and 7 years old nephews had visited us and, using the moment while all adults were sitting in the kitchen and chatting, discovered that it is quite some fun to shake old Christmas tree with falling needles.
First I tried official home page of Tallinn city, checked through any information related to waste collection and environment - nothing. Checked also news on Tallinn website - again nothing. Then I went to good-old Google and tried search using different key words involving Christmas tree, collection, Tallinn, and so on. The only sensible response I got was a 2 years old article from Postimees (one of the 2 largest Estonian daily newspapers) in January 2006, stating the situation 2 years ago. It mentioned that Tallinn has no organised system for Christmas tree collection, but trees can be brought to 2 places where large fires will be organised.
No articles or information for 2008, so I came to conclusion that obviously nothing has changed during those 2 years and there is still no "official" place to get rid of old Christmas trees. The result was also visible in the yard of our apartment house - where some Christmas trees where piling up besides the waste bins (by the way, they are still there by now).
I asked from relatives living in Tallinn what they do with their Christmas tree, and they said that they also leave it by the waste bin, as they have smaller house, and the waste company brings it away. Just leaving our tree by the waste bin we didn't take for an option.
I didn't know any other friend who had a Christmas tree. So this still left us with the problem, what to do with our old Christmas tree.
In the end, we arrived back to the burning option known from my childhood. Not on our balcony, however (although, I'm sure, our nephews would have enjoyed it a lot). We decided to bring the tree to our house under construction, where in spring we can burn it in the garden together with all spring cleaning up.
Despite we found solution, it is very strange that Tallinn, being the largest city and capital of Estonia, has no information what to do with old Christmas trees although that should be pretty common problem in early January. Not everybody has some house with garden where Christmas tree can be burned.
By the way, while writing this post, I decided to run Google search again if there is anything new, and - voilĂ - there is Postimees article published on January 9. It turns out that also this year they will make 2 large fires being also part of Light Festival. Well, too late, folks, our Christmas tree was too tired already by January 5.
Anyhow, in my opinion there should be more specific and timely information for city people what to do with their Christmas trees. Perhaps long-time Tallinn people just know things, but I really couldn't find any sensible information in time when I needed it. One way would be to distribute information together with selling Christmas tree - just small information label where one can dispose it afterwards. That shouldn't be too difficult as information would be town or city specific for every sales place. Perhaps it would help to reduce the number of Christmas trees left by the waste bins.
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