A leading housebuilder has praised pupils at Fulford School for putting their creative recycling skills to the test in a festive challenge.
Persimmon Homes Yorkshire is supporting the inaugural Christmas Tree Festival at St Oswald’s Church and invited the secondary school to get involved.
The housebuilder challenged the pupils to design a Christmas tree on their behalf for the festival, using a £250 budget.
The ‘Ever Green Tree’ was selected as the winning design. It features inventive decorations, made out of salvaged everyday items, and will also see York Foodbank receive a £200 donation towards its Christmas project.
Simon Usher, managing director at Persimmon Homes Yorkshire, said he was impressed with the imaginative, altruistic and innovative designs the pupils created.
He said: “As we are building a major development in Fulford, we are very happy to support the local community and delighted that Fulford School accepted our challenge.
“Each of the school’s houses presented a design and as part of the challenge, the winning team will be responsible for bringing the design to life as they decorate the eight foot tree, on 1st December.
“It was tough to choose a winner but the Athena House team demonstrated great creativity and resourcefulness. Recycling everyday items to create colourful and festive decorations showed great ingenuity.”
The pupils will transform bottle tops into snowmen, corks into reindeers, use CDs to create festive wreaths, while old Christmas cards will replace tinsel as bunting and old keys and fur cones will also hang from the tree with ribbon.
Expenditure has been kept to the minimum with the pupils choosing to recycle existing items so that more money can be given to York Foodbank.
Mrs Savage, headmistress at Fulford School, added: “We were delighted to be part of this exciting project.
“Each team had £250 to spend on their decorations. Team Athena chose to challenge consumer society and demonstrate that everyday items can effectively be reused. They hope their ideas will inspire others, and their charity donation further showed their considered entry. The team certainly deserved to win.”
The St Oswald’s Community Christmas Tree Festival is celebrating the church’s 150th birthday. Organisations, shops and local companies will fill the church with their decorated trees. The trees will be decorated on Thursday 1st December and displayed throughout the festival weekend, and be taken down on Monday 5th December.
Persimmon Homes Yorkshire is further supporting the festival by providing joiners to help fix planks to the pews for smaller tree displays.
For further information on the Persimmon Homes Fulford development, Germany Beck, visit www.persimmonhomes.com.