By Don Cipollini

Evergreen trees have long been associated with winter celebrations because they are beacons of growth, resilience and everlasting life during the bleakest times of the year.

Likely originating in pagan tradition, evergreen conifers were adopted as a symbol of Christmas in north-central Europe. Originally, live trees were decorated in place outside during holiday seasons, but it was Germans and their neighbors living in the late 1400s and early 1500s who decided that decorated Christmas trees would also look good inside houses and other buildings.

Accordingly, the tradition of decorating a Christmas tree in the United States was popularized in the late 1700s and early 1800s by German immigrants. Those first Christmas trees were mostly harvested from wild populations of pines, spruces and firs and brought inside to be decorated. Growing interest in this tradition as the nation expanded led to a need for more trees than were widely available.

Growing Christmas trees as a cash crop in the United States began in the early 1900s in western Pennsylvania. Some of the first Christmas tree plantations were started in Indiana County — the county where I grew up — in 1918. It was there that the cultivation of Christmas trees as we know it was first tried and perfected and innovations such as shearing trees to develop better form and baling trees for ease of shipment were introduced.

By 1956, 700,000 trees were cut in Indiana County, earning it the moniker “Christmas Tree Capital of the World.” I remember a billboard proudly proclaiming this honor along a highway leading to one of the larger producers in the county. It was one of our main claims to fame, along with being the birthplace of actor Jimmy Stewart and writer Edward Abbey. Christmas tree sales would surpass one million by 1960, and many plantations, both large and small, popped up on converted farmland throughout the county and the state as landowners sought to cash in on the gold rush.

Even Taylor Swift spent some of her childhood on a Christmas tree farm in eastern Pennsylvania, immortalizing her experiences in the 2019 song “Christmas Tree Farm.” Many of my friends had summer jobs at Christmas tree nurseries, shearing trees using large machete-like pruning knives that they swung all day in the baking sun. It was a good-paying summer job but backbreaking, and many workers did not stick with it for long. Our beloved local School Forest in Glen Helen was established in 1948, and many an alumnus could attest to the work required to grow and maintain Christmas trees even on a small scale.

Christmas tree production continued to grow in Pennsylvania for a time but eventually leveled off and then declined as technological expertise spread around the country. By the early 1990s, many of those fly-by-night operations established in the 1950s and 1960s were long abandoned. Once six-foot-tall Christmas trees were left to grow into large trees resembling those in the Pine Forest in Glen Helen, which was planted in 1926.

As of 2022, Pennsylvania still ranked fourth in production, with a little more than one million trees cut each year — roughly the total from Indiana County alone in 1960. The leaders were Oregon and North Carolina, cutting more than four million trees each. Michigan ranked third with about 1.5 million trees cut, and Ohio ranked 10th with about 160,000. Some states have risen to prominence while others have fallen, as consumer preferences have shifted and climate change has led to the loss of some previously suitable habitats for optimal Christmas tree growth.

The conifer species grown and sold as Christmas trees have varied over the years, from Scots, Virginia and white pines to white and blue spruces, but the current leading sellers are firs. This is no surprise, as these trees have deep bluish-green soft needles, retain their needles well after being cut and have a wonderful aroma. Firs grow best in the cool climates of northern states such as Oregon and Michigan or at higher elevations in southern states such as North Carolina, helping to explain the leadership of these states in Christmas tree sales.

The current pick of the litter is Fraser fir, and some sellers of live trees, such as big-box stores, offer only this species. Ironically, while grown and sold widely as a Christmas tree, Fraser fir is endangered in its native high-elevation habitats in the southern Appalachian Mountains, existing in only 38 small populations across a few states. It shares this feature with the ginkgo tree, which is endangered — if not extinct — in its native habitats in China but planted widely as a hardy ornamental tree.

The cultivation of Christmas trees is an important component of the green industry, with many environmental benefits over traditional row-crop agriculture. Its semi-naturalistic plantings harbor higher biodiversity than other kinds of cropland, and trees stabilize soil and sequester carbon better and longer than other crops.

But it comes with many of the same concerns as any cultivated crop. Like most crops, large-scale production depends on inputs — many petroleum-based — such as herbicides, insecticides, fertilizers and water, some of which may remain as residues on the tree.

Christmas trees are unlike most other tree crops in that they are brought indoors and handled extensively, where the risk of encountering those residues is higher. That risk can be reduced by thoroughly rinsing the needles and bark of the tree and letting it dry outside before bringing it indoors and decorating it.

There is also a carbon cost associated with growing and transporting trees. One way to make the living Christmas tree tradition greener is to buy organically grown trees. Organic production is possible, but as of now there are only about 50 organic Christmas tree farms in the United States.

Other options include buying local to reduce transportation costs and recycling trees as food and habitat for wildlife. Trees can also be mulched and used as compost, returning nutrients to the earth.

Even better is to buy a living Christmas tree that you plant outdoors each year after the holidays. Before you know it, you may have a Christmas tree crop of your own!

*Yellow Springs resident Don Cipollini, Ph.D., is a professor of biological sciences at Wright State University.