With fakes languishing in some ports, demand grows for NC’s fresh-cut Christmas trees
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Christmas trees in short supply?
COVID-19-induced supply-chain problems have delayed some shipments of artificial Christmas trees. What does the 2021 holiday season look like for purveyors of fresh-cut holiday evergreens? This is the N&O’s special report.
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Christmas arrives in northwestern North Carolina not with a carol or the tinkling of bells, but the revving of high-performance power tools.
“You reckon the saw will crank?” Rusty Estes wondered quietly to himself as the moment finally arrived to fell the official 2021 White House Christmas Tree from a stand of Peak Farms’ Fraser firs.
On his signal, a worker yanked the cord on the Stihl, sending a puff of gasoline exhaust into the sap-scented air.
The chainsaw sliced smoothly through the trunk and dropped this year’s Grand Champion to the ground to the applause of state and local officials, Estes family members and about 40 middle-schoolers studying how Ashe County, N.C., came to be the Christmas Tree Capital of America.
The ceremonial cutting of the White House Blue Room tree — the 14th to be selected from North Carolina since the tradition began — came in the middle of the busiest week of the year for Peak Farms and about 1,300 other Christmas tree growers in the state.
Starting the week before Thanksgiving, they set about cutting, bagging and shipping what’s expected to total between 5.5 million and 6.5 million Christmas trees, another huge crop for North Carolina growers.
While COVID-19-induced supply-chain problems have delayed some shipments of Chinese-made artificial Christmas trees, 2021 is expected to be another great year for purveyors of fresh-cut holiday evergreens.
Sure, said Tim O’Connor, executive director of the National Christmas Tree Association, drought and intense heat in the Pacific Northwest over the summer affected some individual growers in Oregon and Washington state.
And nationwide, the number of real trees now standing tall enough to reach for a nine-foot ceiling had to be started as seedlings about 13 years ago, in 2008, when the nation was in the midst of the Great Recession and many growers were worried about spending the money to plant.
Flexibility in size and species
If there is any scarcity in the supply of fresh-cut trees this year, said Travis Birdsell, Ashe County extension director, it will be among those towering 10-to-15-foot Tannenbaums that some families like to tether to the staircase in a two-story entryway or beneath a cathedral ceiling.
“We believe there are trees out there for everybody,” Birdsell said. ”People may have to be a little more flexible this year in the species or the size, but there should be plenty of trees.”
Among trees grown in North Carolina, there is little room for flexibility in species. Eastern North Carolina Christmas tree growers plant at least a half-dozen species, including pines, cypress and cedars. But more than 99% of Christmas trees grown in the state are produced in western counties and they’re nearly all a variety of the Fraser fir.
According to the state grower’s association, more than 58 million Fraser firs are grown on 38,000 acres of land in 14 western counties, supplying about 20% of the nation’s annual U.S. Christmas tree harvest each year. That makes North Carolina the second-largest producer in the country, behind Oregon, which majors in the Douglas fir and some of its other cousins.
Successful commercial production of Fraser firs started in Ashe County, Birdsell said, in the 1950s, after an entrepreneur from Pinehurst traveled to the mountains looking for trees he could sell and found almost none. The county forester at the time later worked with several local farmers, including Birdsell’s grandfather, to see if it could be a viable industry.
They started with 40 or 50 acres of trees, Birdsell said. The Ashe County Christmas Tree Association says the county is now up to about 12,000 acres growing almost 20 million trees. The group says the local industry provides 700 year-round jobs and, this time of year, employs more than 2,000 people.
In Ashe County alone, the group says, Christmas trees, wreaths and garland are worth more than $85 million.
North Carolina’s ‘Cadillac of Christmas Trees’
The Fraser fir is native to North Carolina’s highest elevations. The trees grown commercially here now are the progeny of seed taken from the tops of Mount Mitchell, Roan Mountain, on the Tennessee-North Carolina line and Mount Rogers in Virginia.
This year’s White House tree came from a stand planted in the 1980s on a hillside that’s now part of Mount Jefferson State Park. The state worked out a deal with Estes to leave the trees in place to serve as seed stock to help keep the industry going.
Effective marketing of the Fraser fir as the “Cadillac of Christmas Trees” has helped popularize the species, along with its fragrance and its soft-but-sturdy branches that can support the chunkiest ornaments.
N.C. growers ship trees to every state in the nation as well as to Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean. Starting the week before Thanksgiving, their Fraser firs also can be found at big-box home-improvement stores, grocery stores and plant nurseries. They’re also sold at hundreds of seasonal tree lots such as the ones Peak Farms and a partner, River Ridge Tree Farms, will operate in Raleigh, Greensboro, Mooresville, Salisbury and Charlotte.
As they did last year, some lots will sell out in the first week, meaning vendors won’t have as many unsold trees at the end of the season as they have some Christmases.
‘People are always going to buy Christmas trees’
In recent years especially, growers say, interest has bloomed in the choose-and-cut sector of Christmas tree sales, with whole families traveling to the mountains to select just the right tree, catch a ride on a hay wagon and sip a cup of hot chocolate.
Because of the pandemic, choose-and-cut operations generally require appointments now, which can be made through the farms’ websites or over the phone.
Estes, a former golf course grounds superintendent, says it’s the greatest honor a grower can have, sending a tree to the White House. This is his third time, having won the competition in 2008 and again in 2012.
But every tree that ends up in someone’s home is noble, he said, noting that each one is part of the celebration of Christ’s birth.
“People are always going to buy Christmas trees,” Estes said. “No matter how hard the times are, Christmas brings families together.”
Some years, he said, “Might not have much under the tree, but it’s a family time.”
