“When the hedgerows came out round here, the oaks went on the bonfire. I have spent forty years carving Christmas trays out of them instead.” — Aubrey Tranter (68) carves every tray from one solid piece of English oak.

His grandfather took on the farm outside Kington in 1931. When its hedgerows were grubbed out in 1986, every old oak in them went on a bonfire — and Aubrey dragged one of them off it. Christmas 1988 he gave his mum a little tray shaped like a Christmas tree, carved from that log. Forty years later, those trays — each one cut from a single piece of wood, never glued together from strips — are still the only thing he makes.

Kington, December. The workshop is the old stone barn behind the farmhouse, a mile out of town on the road towards the Welsh border. It smells of sawdust, linseed and, faintly, the wood burner in the corner. The workbench is worn pale in two places where his forearms rest. On the wall hang a bandsaw, a row of carving gouges and one photograph: three men and a cart horse beside a hedge of tall oaks, taken in 1931, the year the family took the tenancy. Herefordshire has been oak country for as long as anyone has written it down, and for most of Aubrey’s life the hedgerow oaks were simply part of the view.

“My grandfather laid those hedges,” Aubrey says. “My dad cut and laid them every winter after him. I was out there with a billhook from the age of twelve.” In 1986 the fields were opened up for bigger machinery. The hedges were grubbed out, the old oaks in them pushed over and burned, and four miles of hedgerow went that way over one winter. Aubrey was twenty-eight.

“I was not saving a tree,” he says. “The tree was already down. I just could not stand there and watch good oak burn.” He took one log home on a borrowed trailer. It sat in the barn for two years drying out. Then, the week before Christmas 1988, he carved a little tray out of it in the shape of a Christmas tree and gave it to his mum. She filled it with her shortbread that night. It still comes out of her cupboard every December, thirty-eight Christmases running.

He has carved every Christmas since, and every shape has a reason. The tree came first, for his mother. The reindeer for his grandchildren, who used to leave carrots out on one for Santa’s team. The gingerbread man for her biscuit tins. The snowman because it has not had a proper white Christmas in Kington since he was a boy and his wife thought that was funny. The Santa hat and the stocking because people kept asking.

Two things ruin a wooden serving tray

“Everybody buys the cheap one once,” he says. “By next Christmas the shine has gone cloudy, there is a dark line down the middle and it rocks on the table. So you buy another one.”

The first is the glue seam. Turn almost any wooden Christmas tray over and you will count four or five narrow strips of plantation timber glued together, sanded flat and stained so it looks like one piece. It isn’t. Water works into the seams every time it goes in the sink, the strips move against each other through a damp winter and a centrally heated sitting room, and the joint opens into a dark line that no amount of oil closes again.

The second is wood that was dried too fast. A freshly felled oak log is close to half water. Aubrey air-dries his wood for months, finishes it in a small drying kiln, then lets it rest again before a gouge touches it. Skip that and the tray looks perfect the day it arrives and shows a hairline crack across a compartment six weeks later for no visible reason.

He throws away one tray in five to stay ahead of the second problem. He does not have the first problem at all, because there is nothing in his trays to glue.

Why a glued tray cannot be saved

Every December somebody turns up at the barn with a tray under their arm and asks him to save it. Never one of his — these are Christmas trays people bought in the shops or online, sometimes for good money, and used for a season or two. There is a crate in the corner full of the ones he had to hand back: a cheap tree tray with a black line straight down the trunk where the glue let go, a reindeer gone grey and fuzzy after a few trips through a dishwasher, a snowman shedding its lacquer in little clear flakes.

He can tell you what killed each one, usually in about four seconds. What nobody can do is put them back together. “There is nothing in there to fix,” he says. “Once a glue seam opens, that tray is finished. You can sand it, you can oil it, you can leave it on the windowsill for a week. The line comes back.”

Most of them go home with one of his instead. One tray, one piece of English oak and nothing else — no strips, no glue, no lacquer, no seam that opens two Christmases from now.

What comes off a plastic party platter

In 2013, doctors at Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan tested something most of us do every Christmas without a second thought. They served hot noodle soup in melamine bowls — the hard, shiny plastic most Christmas platters, children’s party plates and divided snack trays are made of — and measured what came out in people’s urine over the next twelve hours.

After the soup from the melamine bowls, the volunteers passed roughly six times as much melamine as after the very same soup from ceramic bowls. Heat is what pulls it out of the plastic, and acid helps it along: warm dips, sausage rolls, cranberry sauce, a squeeze of lemon. Exactly what ends up on a Christmas platter.

It is not one study. Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment now advises against putting hot food on melamine tableware at all, because heat and acid break the plastic down. And in 2023, engineers at the University of Nebraska found that some plastic food containers, once heated, released up to two billion tiny plastic particles from every square centimetre. Hot food and plastic simply do not belong together.

Every tray gives a little of itself to whatever sits on it. The difference is what it gives. Plastic gives up plastic, and plastic does not belong next to your food — not hot, not sour, not at all. Wood gives up nothing you would mind eating.

What makes Aubrey’s trays different

• One solid piece: Carved from a single block, never glued from strips. The grain runs unbroken from the rim to the bottom of every compartment, and through to the back, which is how you can tell.
• Rescued, not felled: The timber comes from oaks brought down by storms or felled for safety along Herefordshire lanes. No healthy living tree is cut to make a tray.
• The wood they built ships from: English oak is dense, tough and close-grained. It does not splinter, it shrugs off a cheese knife, and with a little oil it only gets deeper in colour over the years.
• Dried slowly, then rested: Months of air drying, then a kiln, then rest again before the first cut. This is the step cheap trays skip.
• Food-safe finish only: Scraped by hand and oiled with food-safe mineral oil. No lacquer, no sealant, nothing to flake off onto your mince pies.
• No two alike: Every tray comes out of a different log, so colour, weight and grain vary. Yours is the only one like it.

Six shapes, out every Christmas, used all year

Aubrey carves the compartments deep and rounds every inside corner, because he knows how a little Christmas tray actually gets used. The tree goes out with mince pies on Christmas Eve. The reindeer holds clementines by the front door. The gingerbread man gets walnuts and the stocking gets the chocolates nobody admits to eating. And because they are just wood, they do not have to go back in the loft on Boxing Day: olives and cheese at New Year, an after-school snack in February, keys and reading glasses on the dresser the rest of the year.

Each one is small enough to fit in two hands — the tree is about 20 by 14 centimetres, the snowman, the biggest, about 30 centimetres tall — and big enough to set a little Christmas on any table in the house.

What his customers say

• ★★★★★

  “I bought the tree for my mum’s eightieth and I nearly kept it. She turned it over twice looking for the joints. Then she made my sister come into the kitchen to look at it. It has been on her worktop since the first of December with her mince pies on it, and she has started apologising to guests for taking any, which I take as a good sign.”

  – Gillian H., 58, Leominster
• ★★★★★

  “The grain runs right through to the back, which is how you know it is one piece. The tree tray I bought at a garden centre two Christmases ago was four strips and the middle seam had gone black. I wash this one by hand, oil it once a month, and after eleven months it is still dead flat on the table. No rocking, no split, nothing.”

  – Trevor R., 64, Ludlow
• ★★★★★

  “I ordered the reindeer and the gingerbread man for the grandchildren’s biscuit plate on Christmas Eve. Now I own two Christmas decorations I use every week of the year. My granddaughter calls the reindeer ‘Rudolph’s plate’ and will not eat her apple slices off anything else.”

  – Pauline S., 61, Cheltenham

One man, one pair of hands

Aubrey is 68 and he works alone. There is no second bench in the barn, no apprentice, no son who wanted the trade. “It takes years before you have it in your hands,” he says. “Nobody has that kind of patience for a little wooden tray anymore.”

What comes out of that barn in a good week is what one man can saw, dry, carve and oil by himself — and one in five of those goes in the burn barrel before it ever gets wrapped. That is the entire supply. There is no factory behind it and no second batch waiting on a shelf somewhere.

His niece Tamsin (34) set the small shop up online for him over a single weekend. “At my age I do not know the first thing about all that internet business,” he says. “She told me I was not going to spend another December stood behind a trestle table at the Christmas market in the cold. She was right.”

Where can you buy Aubrey’s Christmas trays?

The trays are sold only through County Craft, the small shop Tamsin runs for him. Not on Amazon, not in the shops, not through anybody else.

One word of warning: a glued-up tray of plantation timber with a dark stain photographs almost exactly like a single piece in a listing photo. The difference only shows on the back, where the grain either runs through or stops at a seam.

Fill it. Serve on it. Put it under the tree for somebody who still bakes. If it is not right — the size, the shape, the grain, or no reason at all — send it back within 90 days for your money back. No restocking fee, and nobody will ask you to explain yourself.