Just days ago, the outstretched evergreen boughs held candy canes and colored balls and tickled the hands of anxious children reaching for gifts on Christmas morning.

Now that they have witnessed the seasonal smiles and surprises, the Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful program is asking that those trees find a new life at area recycling locations.

“We are trying to take old Christmas trees and give them a new life,” said Christi Cakiroglu, the program’s executive director. “This is a way to prolong their life.”

Clean, undecorated trees are being accepted at the Shadow Mountain Sports Complex in Sparks, as well as at Bartley Ranch Regional Park and Rancho San Rafael Regional Park in Reno.

Traditionally, the program has accepted trees at the west entrance to Shadow Mountain. However, this year the trees are being collected at the Shadow Lane entrance instead of the Sparks Boulevard entrance.

Last year, the program collected more than 3,500 trees at the Shadow Lane location and collected about 10,000 trees regionally.

“It has been increasing steadily every year,” said Stan Scherer, director of the Sparks Parks and Recreation Department.

The parks department introduces the trees to their new home along river trails after they have been collected and chopped into mulch.

“We chip them up and we primarily use the mulch for weed control areas,” Schere said.

The tonnage for the chipped wood is not measured by the parks department, he added, but about 75 percent of the total goes toward erosion and weed abatement along the Truckee River at Rock Park.

Cakiroglu added that the chipped trees give new life to soil by changing its chemistry.

“Christmas trees are great for those projects because it is acidic and changes the pH,” Cakiroglu said.

Some of the unused chipped wood is available to area homeowners through the Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful program by calling 851-5185.

However, Scherer cautioned that because the trees are so naturally acidic, they can spell disaster for a flower bed.

“There is a reason you don’t find many wildflowers growing beneath pine trees,” Scherer said.

The tree recycling program was one of the first to be adopted after Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful initiative began 20 years ago.

“One of the reasons why this program was started was that people were taking trees to open spaces and thinking that because they were organic they would just break down.” Cakiroglu said. “But they are really acidic and they don’t break down well if you leave them. It takes years and years and years. It is also not very appealing to see a dead tree lying on the ground.”

Cakiroglu and her staff of almost 200 volunteers are asking for a $3 minimum donation from those dropping off their trees, which will go towards funding the $15,000 tree recycling program.