Ever Hear of This Charity Idea?

I went to my parents' house over the weekend to help them with their big-ass tree. It's huge, and now that my dad's constantly winded from treatments (he has bladder cancer) and my mom's barely walking these days, it's pretty much up to me to put it all up, which takes a while because it's about 8 feet tall, at least 5 feet wide and has hundreds of ornaments.

That leaves a lot of time for talking. And as we unpacked and organized Christmas stuff, my dad shared a few stories about the food pantry he helps out at. (He switched his treatment schedule to accommodate a few hours at their church's pantry, which is amazing to me. He certainly has an excuse to not give back, I'd think, given his circumstances.  But I digress.) We talked about needy family's holidays, and I got to thinking: is there a charity that collects Christmas trees and ornaments to hand out to the poor?

Think about it: people every so often get a new fake tree -- or a fake tree is "free up" when a person dies, as in the case of our friend Lorraine -- and this usually pretty decent or still usable fake Christmas tree is available. And what about all the ornaments that, in my mom's words, you just want to break because you never really liked them in the first place, or you're just tired of 'em (in our case, we have hundreds -- hundreds! -- of ornaments for our tree and surely don't need them all)? It would be a shame to throw them out or give them to someone who doesn't really want them. What about poor families without  money to invest in trees and decorations? Trees bring so much cheer and not having one if you celebrate Christmas is a big contrary to the holiday. (Let's put aside the debate about what Christmas is really about and agree that it's nice to have holiday decorations).

The ideal time to hook people into donating would be post-Christmas, and it would take a lot of pre-planning and publicity. I'm going to investigate this and report back. If you've heard of any organized charity or specific mission to donate trees, let me know.