Mountain cedar pollen peaks in Central Texas between December and February. If you want medication working by the time it arrives, you start a few weeks ahead, in November. If you want next winter to be different rather than merely medicated, you start in September, because allergy shots need months of build before they protect anything.
Cedar fever is not a fever
The tree is Ashe juniper, called mountain cedar across the Hill Country and down into McLennan County. What it produces is a pollen allergy, and a pollen allergy does not raise your temperature.
The name causes real harm every winter. A genuine fever points at something else, usually a virus going around at the same time of year, and it is worth having checked rather than absorbed into “cedar season”. Meanwhile people who do have cedar allergy treat it as flu, wait for it to break, and lose six weeks waiting for the end of something that has months left to run.
What cedar actually produces is the standard pollen picture: sneezing, nasal congestion, a runny nose, watery eyes, and an itchy throat and eyes. The itch is the part that tells you it is pollen rather than a virus.
What mountain cedar does that other pollens do not
It pollinates in the dead of winter
Almost everything else waits for warmth. Cedar opens the Central Texas tree season in winter, and the rest of the trees follow it through to June, which means the pollen calendar here effectively runs without a break. That timing is why cedar catches people out. Nobody expects a pollen problem in January.
Wind is what moves it
Cedar pollen travels on the wind, and a windy day puts far more of it into the air you are breathing. It is the same mechanism our patients notice in spring, which we wrote about in what windy weather does to pollen allergies. Watching the forecast is genuinely useful in cedar season, because the worst days are usually the ones you could have seen coming.
The preparation calendar
The earlier steps are the ones that change how the season goes.
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- September, get tested if you never have. Plenty of people who assume they have cedar allergy react to something else entirely, and plenty who blame a winter cold turn out to be reacting to cedar. Testing settles it, and everything after this step is built on the answer.
- September to October, ask whether immunotherapy makes sense. Allergy shots build over months rather than weeks, so autumn is when a course started now can be doing something by midwinter.
- Late November, start your season medication. The American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology advises beginning ahead of the season rather than after symptoms arrive. Their own worked example is to start at the end of March for a mid April peak, which for a December peak puts you in the second half of November.
- December to February, keep the pollen outside. Keep the windows shut, particularly on windy days. Shower and change after a long spell outside so you are not carrying pollen into the bedroom, and run the car air conditioning on recirculate.
- Any month, if it never settles, look past cedar. Symptoms that continue after February are pointing at something else, and dust mites and indoor mold are the usual candidates in a shut up winter house.
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“Ask your allergist about medications that can be taken in advance of pollen season.”
— American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology
If you want next winter to be different
Medication manages a season. Immunotherapy is the option that changes what your immune system does with cedar in the first place, and it is the reason the calendar above starts in September rather than November.
It is a real commitment, and it is better to know the shape of it before you agree to it. In the first six weeks you would come in twice a week, roughly a dozen visits. Through the first year the visits stay weekly. From the second year they space out to every two to four weeks, and a full course usually runs three to five years. The same college describes that arc as weekly injections for around seven months, then every two weeks, then eventually every four.
That is a lot of appointments for a tree. It is also the only approach on this page that treats the cause rather than the season, which is why patients who have had a decade of bad Januaries are usually the ones who ask about it.
You can read what is in the air month by month on our Central Texas allergy seasons page, look at how immunotherapy works here, or request an appointment and we will call you to get it scheduled.
