On the Sunday before Easter, called Palm Sunday, Catholic churches (and probably other denominations, as well) distribute palm fronds to parishoners. Which leads me to wonder: There are a lot of Catholics and a lot of Catholic churches in the world, and all of those palm fronds had to be grown somewhere. On the other hand, though, there’s almost no demand for palms the rest of the year (or at least, so I’m guessing). So there has to be an industry set up to do business for one day a year, growing a rather long-term plant. This doesn’t seem economical at all, but obviously, it’s done somehow. How?
In my pre-agnostic days I was Catholic and still am when I meet a religious girl.
I seem to recall that the palms were always dried and dead. So it’s a simple problem. Grow the palms and cut them throughout the year. Then freeze-dry them or just bundle them and keep them in the proverbial cool dry place until Palm Sunday.
Are you kidding? There is a huge demand for palm trees for landscaping in all the temperate areas of the country. Even with a thriving palm nursery industry, there is a growing problem with palm tree theft. In Southern California, where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a palm tree, people wake up to find a big hole in the front yard where their prize palm tree use to be. Supplying a few palm fronds for church services really isn’t a big problem, it just reduces the pressure on landfills from the huge amount of palm waste generated by landscape maintenance.
As well as the palms used for landscaping, there are also palms grown commercially for coconut and date production. I would imagine these industries produce a lot of palm frond waste as a by-product. Large commercial operations are probably set up to sell the stuff in quantity to the ecclesiastical supply houses, as well as to a few people wanting to use it as decorative thatch.
I didn’t mean the whole trees, I meant the individual fronds. And every church I’ve ever been to Palm Sunday at used fronds which were still green and healthy, so they weren’t freeze-dried. Likewise, I don’t think that they’re the ones which just fell off the tree naturally, as those would also be dead.
As I understand it, those same palm fronds are a major ingredient in making certain kinds of high-quality paper.
So there is probably a good supply of them available year-around.
There’s quite a demand for date palm fronds amongst Jews around the Sukkoth holiday (September-October).
You may be thinking of your leftover fronds. All the churches I’ve been to on Palm Sunday have used brand new fronds. Of course, I don’t know if new fronds are necessary, so old fronds might have been used at your church.
My point was that there is no shortage of palm fronds, which churches can purchase over the internet from church supply companies. If you want to know exactly where the supplier gets them, I would bet it is from palm nurseries who raise them for landscapers, but you could ask them to be sure.
I went a Catholic grade school and I vaguely recall that Palm Sunday fronds were recycled into Ash Wednesday ashes the following year. Palm fronds dry out but stay largely intact if left to themselves. I recall that one year I stuck my Palm Sunday frond on a cork board in my room and while it turned brown it kept its form for a long while, until my mom finally threw it out.
Emphasis added.
And here’s another year-round use for palm fronds.
And, why palms?
Peace
Hosanna, Heysanna, Sanna, Sanna, Ho.
Some churches, especially in California grow Canary Island Date palms (or other palms). Canary Island Dates (Phoenix canariensis) have very full crowns of up to twenty leaves that can reach 10 feet long. Each leaf will have at least a couple hundred leaflets. So, our church would simply cut down a few fronds (which often need to be cut since the tree was young and had maybe 7 feet of trunk, to keep the fronds out of the way). It would regrow a few each year so the tree didn’t loose much canopy.
Now they simply get the leaves from a supplier. Who that supplier is, I don’t know.
What do the churches do with the fronds after they are done with them? Unless they burn them, I would assume the fronds go straight back into the landfill where they would have gone anyway.
To the OP, I can assure you there are more palm trees than Catholics.
fiddlesticks is right, as I recall. I went to Catholic school and regularly to church. The palms are blessed, so throwing them out is kinda taboo. They get burned, instead, and then next year on Ash Wednesday, the ashes are smeared on the foreheads of believers. (The smear is cross-shaped, and the symbolism is of bearing the mark of the cross, and of ‘dwelling in ashes’ as a sign of humility, IIRC)
However, some people like to hang on to their palms. Particularly among some of the older francophone catholics I know, it’s fashionable to take the palms home, and use them to decorate. Often they’re braided or otherwise woven togheter, and hung on the frame of, say, a picture of Christ or the Virgin. My Grandmother still has some, I think, from over fifteen years ago.
After a while, they dry to a sort of creamy-beige colour, and are very tough. They don’t rot, in my experience.