Christmas Tree Festival - 2025
A huge thank you to the fantastic 32 local organisations that took part in this year’s Christmas Tree Festival at St Paul’s Church, by supplying and creatively decorating a Christmas tree. Thank you also to everyone who showed their support on the night by visiting St Paul’s to vote for their favourite Christmas trees – over 600 of you!! The votes have been counted and verified and we can now reveal this year’s winners…
1st Place
4th Shipley Rangers
2nd Place
Shipley Recorders & Wycliffe CE Primary Recorder Club
3rd Place
Wycliffe CE Primary School
4th Shipley Rangers
4th Shipley Rangers meet at Northcliffe Church on a Tuesday. Rangers is a girl led space, to get together with other girls from 14 to 18 to have fun, learn more, give back, hang out, and just be themselves. Rangers is part of Girlguiding UK, and they have created this Christmas tree to embody everything they enjoy about being a Ranger. A tent to represent camping and sleepovers, badges on the tinsel along with a fire, food and friendship… all must have elements of our activities! We are entirely run by volunteers and are always looking for extra help. For more information, please visit www.girlguiding.org.uk/joinus.
Shipley Recorders & Wycliffe CE Primary Recorder Club
The Shipley Recorders offers high-level recorder ensemble training to secondary-aged students. In making their tree they have been assisted by the Wycliffe CE Primary Recorder Club, which is the training group that feeds into the Shipley Recorders. We take great pleasure in making music at as high a standard as we can, and we hope you take equal pleasure in our tree, which represents the enjoyment music brings us at Christmas. We take a sustainable approach and only use saplings or branches that need to be removed in any case. The recorders on the tree are old designs that now have no value as playing instruments!
Wycliffe CE Primary School
This year, the Wycliffe CE Primary School Christmas tree baubles have been inspired by Bradford’s City of Culture 2025 theme colours. The designs reflect the city’s heritage, culture and landscape: from mills, moors, stained-glass windows and iconic buildings to food traditions and textiles. Every year group explored a different artistic focus such as texture, mosaic, mixed media, typography or abstract design. Together, the baubles showcase Bradford’s identity through creativity, colour and community spirit.
Many congratulations to our three winners, who will each receive a certificate and a cash prize of:
1st Place – £80
2nd Place – £50
3rd Place – £30
The prize fund is made up of the £5 that each organisation paid to sponsor a tree at the festival.
We would like to give honourable mentions to Scraptastic and Leelas Ladybirds Private Day Nursery, who narrowly missed out, placing 4th and 5th respectively. Here are a few more photos showcasing this year’s wonderful trees:
This year’s Christmas trees will remain in church until the New Year, where they will be lit up at selected services throughout the Advent and Christmas season, so if you didn’t get a chance to come along to the festival, perhaps you can see them at one of the upcoming services or events listed below.
