Blue Christmas: Y Service Club announces end to decades of tree sales

But with dwindling volunteer numbers, the club has announced an end to their annual Christmas tree sale.

Y Service Club of Bendigo executive council member Rob Green said he was disappointed the club could not continue with the tradition, but it was "physically beyond" members' capability.

"The club is unfortunately one of those organisations that is having trouble gaining new members, and we are gradually sort of fading away," he said.

Mr Green, who joined the club in 1974, described the Christmas tree sales as a young person's game.

"[The club has] about 14 active members with a mid-80s average age, and with three or four of us in our 90s," he said.

"And when you have got to throw a 25-kilogram tree four feet above your head, it is a bit of exercise."

The Christmas tree sales started in 1954 as a way to raise money, with the club taking 20 pounds in revenue.

By 1960, 300 trees were being sold each year.

In more recent years, Mr Green said the club was known to sell "a hundred trees in a matter of hours" from the YMCA stadium on Mundy Street.

Bendigo families had made a decades long tradition out of buying their tree from the Y Service Club, Mr Green said.

"In recent years, we have actually been selling trees to people who were grandchildren of our original customers back in the 1950s and 1960s," he said.

"It has been a very loyal association and unfortunately we are pulling out on it... and we feel terrible about that."

The end of Christmas tree sales meant the Y Service Club had lost both of its major fundraising projects, after it handed over the running of its Book Fair to Bendigo Foodshare earlier in 2023.

"The only reason why we had to make money was to raise funds so that we could support a whole lot of organisations in Bendigo," Mr Green said.

"Unfortunately that has all come to an end."

Mr Green said the club would put up a sign on Mundy Street to announce to end of sales.