The jolly fat man with the beard is gone, but the town of Arlington, Wash., had other jolly creatures with beards to help clean up the Christmas decorations by offering a unique method of Christmas tree recycling.

Goats at an animal rescue munched their way through the town's abandoned Christmas trees in a post-holiday feeding frenzy. "People think that's the coolest thing to recycle their trees by feeding them to goats," Ellen Felsenthal, owner of New Moon Farm Goat Rescue and Sanctuary, told KING5 TV.

New Moon Farm is a non-profit that rescues and rehabilitates the goats before putting them out for adoption. With anywhere from 30 to 40 rescued goats living on the premises at any one time, Felsenthal and her goat tenants can always use some extra feed, in this case Christmas tree recycling. And with a year-round supply of roughage necessary to supplement the plant-based diet of goats, the discarded Christmas trees do the trick.

The ability to recycle a real Christmas tree has been touted as one of the reasons to go green every holiday, but that traditionally means sending the pines through a wood chipper to become mulch or compost. Does your town's "treecycle" program incorporate the animals?