Classes, greenery and trees.

Jill Glover with Schneider Nursery said “That’s us” this time of year.

Christmas workshops continue to be popular at the nursery at 3066 E. U.S. 50 between Seymour and Brownstown.

Signups opened Oct. 1 for the workshops, including wreath, swag, centerpiece, gnome and porch planter. Several, however, are sold out. To register online and learn more, visit schneidernursery.com/christmas-workshops.

This year’s theme is “A Christmas Story.”

“Our main focus is always our live greenery, and so we do classes every year, and in all of the classes, we use greenery cut from our fields, so it’s a benefit we have,” Glover said. “We have all of these trees growing. We have some large evergreens where they may not be sellable, so we get a cut, fresh greenery from them. It smells good, lasts all holiday season.”

Retailwise, Glover said this used to be a dead season for the nursery. Since starting the workshops, that’s no longer the case.

“About eight years ago, we started offering classes,” she said. “The first class we tried in 2015, we just kind of put it out there and we were like, ‘I don’t know if anybody will sign up.’ In my head, I was like, ‘If we have 20 people come, I will be so excited,’ and we had 65 sign up. I was like, ‘I don’t know if there is going to be a demand for it. I don’t know if people will respond to it,’ but it has been so fun.”

The first year consisted of a couple of centerpiece classes. Since then, other types of classes have been added, and Glover and her staff have come up with a different theme each year.

The classes initially had around 30 people apiece, but that has been brought down since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Since then, we realized it’s just a more intimate, laid-back setting with fewer people, and so we tried to offer more classes, less numbers,” Glover said. “It didn’t feel as crowded, and you get to actually talk to everybody when they’re here. That piece is good.”

Local florist Bobby Eldridge teaches the centerpiece classes, Jan Hines leads the gnome classes and Glover does the rest.

Drinks and snacks are provided, and merchandise is available to buy in the garden center for people to add to their creation if they wish.

“It brings people in,” Glover said of the workshops. “There’s just something magical about the Christmas season, and it has been so fun because we have new people every year, but we also have the same groups that have come year after year and they’ve made a tradition of ‘I come with my family and I make wreaths’ or ‘I come with my girlfriends and we do a centerpiece’ and they make a night out of it.”

Glover said the nursery also offers five to 10 workshops for private groups during the daytime or evening.

Plus, a Christmas Story Family Fun event is planned for 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dec. 9.

“Just to get people out here, Christmas spirit, it’s just fun,” Glover said.

The past three years for that event, Doug Towriss has brought his Clydesdales for sleigh rides through the nursery’s fields, but he’s not able to do that this year.

“We’re taking a year off and then just reassessing for next year,” Glover said.

People also can stop by during regular business hours and buy a small or large greenery bundle. Samples are available to view in the garden center, and staff can share ways to use it.

“How you can take this and make it a centerpiece or they can bring a pot from their porch and we’d show them how to put greenery in it,” Glover said. “They can add lights and stems, pine cones, you name it. We try to keep it all natural, but then as you look around, you can see we have lots of stuff they can add to it to make it pretty.”

Pine, spruce, arbor vitae and fir are the types of greenery available.

“We grow like eight to 10 varieties of arbor vitae, but we have favorites that are best for greenery that’s cut,” Glover said.

As for trees, Schneider Nursery sells balled-and-burlapped Norway spruce, Serbian spruce and white spruce that people can use as a Christmas tree and plant it after the holidays.

“We have little hand-dug ones that are easy to move in and out, and a lot of people have made the tradition of coming in, getting one of those, decorating it in their yard and then planting it so they have their Christmas trees through the years out on their property,” Glover said. “It is a very cool idea, so that’s fun.”

November and December also are good times to plant shade trees and evergreens, she said.

“We plant all the way up to Christmas Eve, so we have crews of guys that go out the month of December and do delivery and plantings from orders,” Glover said. “We start taking orders in September, and we have like over 150 trees coming up to be picked up by people who have ordered.”