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🌤️Partly sunny with highs in the 30s. Sunset is at 4:16 p.m.
Today we feature a video about how Christmas trees grow, from seed to sprout to living room and then back to nature. Think of it as an arboreal Christmas Carol where we are visited by the ghosts of Christmas Tree Past, Present, and Future. And a reminder: next week we’ll be checking in with GBH reporters about the stories they covered throughout 2025. If there’s a particular topic or issue you’d like us to focus on after a very (very) busy news year, reply to this email or send a note to daily@wgbh.org.
GBH Daily will be back in your inboxes on Monday, Dec. 29.
Four Things to Know
1. Gov. Maura Healey said she plans to vote against a proposed 2026 ballot question that would cap rent increases at 5% statewide because she worries it would limit new housing construction. The ballot question, as currently written, would not apply to owner-occupied units with four or fewer units or to new buildings in their first 10 years.
“I don’t want to see housing production stopped,” Healey said. “We need to have housing production move forward. I also understand what’s driving rent control. I want to work together to do something that’s sensible, that creates more homes, builds more homes and lowers costs for people.”
2. Robert Devine — the former Stoughton deputy police chief accused of inappropriate conduct with Sandra Birchmore, a young woman found dead in her apartment in 2021 — will no longer be able to work as a police officer in Massachusetts, the state’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission decided last week.
Birchmore joined the department’s Police Explorers program, which Devine oversaw, when she was a teenager. Investigators say Devine knew that two officers, brothers Matthew and William Farwell, were sexually abusing her but didn’t intervene. Devine was also accused of having sexual relations with Birchmore when she was an adult, while he was on duty. Devine retired from Stoughton’s police department in 2022 and now works as a lawyer.
3. Home health aides and personal care attendants who live with the people they care for will no longer have to pay state or federal income taxes in Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey announced. The new policy will impact about 18,000 people who make $20-$25.65 an hour.
“Attendants aren’t really paid all that well. The wage is good compared to other states, but the cost of living in this state is very high,” said Bill Henning, executive director of the disability advocacy nonprofit Boston Center for Independent Living. He called aides’ work “vital.” “They enable people with disabilities, including seniors, to live independently in the community — often, stay out of a nursing facility, and otherwise just be where people want to be: at home.”
4. The Pine Street Inn’s staff and volunteers will serve about 1,000 meals today to people staying in their shelters and living on the street. On the menu: New York strip steak, rolls, and chocolate cake, as well as performances from carolers.
“Around this time last year we might have had about 550 guests in our shelters. This year we have something closer to 700,” Vice President of Marketing and Communications Baraba Trevisan told GBH’s Esteban Bustillos. “And we certainly don’t like to turn people away, especially in the cold weather. So, we’ve put out not just our beds, but mats, cots, even chairs so that we don’t turn people away. But yeah, the demand has been up.”
What’s it take to grow a Christmas tree? Here’s the story
An eight-foot Christmas tree takes 7 to 10 years to grow from seed. At Arrowhead Acres in Uxbridge, those trees spend the first two years of their lives as seedlings gathered in small pots. And caring for them is a year-round endeavor.
“A lot of people think it’s a get-rich-quick scheme until they start planting them and discover how much work is involved in taking care of them,” owner David Morin told GBH’s Curiosity Desk reporter Edgar B. Herwick III. “The first time I did this, the greenhouse got too hot and I cooked about 50,000 seedlings.”
Once the seedlings are about 6 inches tall, they can be planted outside as saplings. Then it’s a “constant battle keeping the woodlands from coming back on the trees,” Morin said: fungi, insects, and deer can all damage the crops.
Then there’s the matter of giving them that conical Christmas tree shape: the Nova Scotia farm that grows trees for Mahoney’s Evergreens locations in Massachusetts employs people who walk around the farm, trimming the branch tips of each one of the one million trees on the farm every year, said Brett Mahoney, shipping coordinator for Mahoney’s Evergreens.
“The tree, every year, it becomes denser and fuller, and the shape is trained into a nice, beautiful-looking tree,” Mahoney told Herwick.
Or as Morin put it: “If you don’t prune them, then they’ll look like very wide-open trees that you can fly airplanes through.”
Mahoney said he’s one of the people who travels up to the Nova Scotia farm every year to pick out the trees that are ready to be cut down and sent to garden centers and tree lots, then covered in ornaments inside customers’ homes.
We conclude with a short visit from the Ghost of Christmas Tree Future: after the holiday, the city of Boston alone will collect between 1,200 to 1,700 cubic yards of Christmas trees to be recycled. Those trees get turned into wood chips and mulch and live a second life in parks and yards.
You can watch the full Curiosity Desk video here.
More holiday cheer:
-Callie Crossleys’ commentary: A thoughtful gift for Black Santa season
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