Chip and Joanna Gaines Fed Their Massive Christmas Tree to the Family's Goats — Here's Why

Chip and Joanna Gaines had a unique way of getting rid of their Christmas tree — and it didn’t even leave their farm!

Ahead of the new year, the Fixer Upper stars took down their beautiful evergreen and fed it to their family goats instead of just tossing it on the curb, House Beautiful reported.

Joanna reportedly documented the process on her Instagram Story on Friday, sharing some photos and videos of the family taking down their ornaments and lights before Chip lugged the tree outside to an open field on their property in Waco, Texas.

Once her husband got the 13-foot tree in position, their herd of goats surrounded the plant, ready to dig in.

“They’ve been waiting for this all year,” the mother of five said of the animals in a caption over the footage, according to the outlet.

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Feeding Christmas trees to goats is actually not uncommon, as the needles of the tree make a tasty and healthy meal for farm animals like goats and cows. In fact, many farms and farm animal sanctuaries happily take Christmas trees that are undecorated, untreated and still green at the end of the season for this reason.

“They have natural Vitamin C in them and they also work as a natural de-wormer, so we do give it to them in controlled amounts,” Cathy Rosebrock, an educator at the Crowley Museum and Nature Center in Sarasota, Florida, told WFTS on the subject.

“It’s a friendly and environmental way to get rid of your Christmas tree,” Rosebrock added.

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The Gaines family first put up their festive tree before Thanksgiving, with Joanna documenting the behind-the-scenes process that included several large storage bins of decorations, a tangle of holiday lights and a brief intermission for cookie baking.

In an essay from 2018, Joanna explained that she likes to adorn her tree with ornaments that commemorate important memories from her family’s lives. Some of those highlight her children — Drake, 14, Ella Rose, 13, Duke, 11, Emmie Kay, 9, and Crew, 16 months — including their first Christmases and first lost tooth.

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“I want to decorate our tree with our same ornaments that we ooh and ahh over each year,” she wrote. “Our tree could never be complete without the kids’ handmade offerings. And while the Popsicle-stick picture frames have cracked over the years and the photos within them have faded — it only makes me love them all the more.”

She added about her family’s passion for the holidays: “We count down the days, just to experience it nearly exactly as we always have. It is so comfortable, familiar and perfectly nostalgic that, frankly, we have no desire to improve upon it at all.”