Need a Christmas Tree? Here’s Some Great News. Don’t worry if you haven’t purchased a Christmas tree yet this year; the cost is about the same as it was in 2023.
According to an annual survey conducted by the Real Christmas Tree Board, which is headquartered in Howell, Michigan, and is supported by yearly fees paid by importers and producers, growers did not anticipate raising wholesale prices.
“It is comparable to the previous year. Jill Sidebottom, a spokesman for the National Christmas Tree Association, a trade association that supports the tree business, “It seems like wholesalers are keeping their prices the same.”
A Christmas tree’s median cost decreased from $80 in 2022 to $75 in 2023.
“We are grateful that families are still hanging real trees, and demand has fortunately been extremely robust since COVID. “The alternative is plastic, and that’s not good for the environment,” Lisa Angevine-Bergs, executive director of the Connecticut Christmas Tree Growers and owner of the Angevine Farm in Warren, Connecticut.
“It’s more expensive the closer to the city you get,” she stated.
Due to a decline in supply, Christmas tree costs have increased during the past 15 years.
Sidebottom noted that it might take up to ten years for a tree to mature and added, “The original tight supply goes back to 2008, when there was an oversupply and growers stopped planting as many.” In the Pacific Northwest, severe weather, including a heat dome in 2021, also killed a lot of trees.
Every state in the union grows Christmas trees, although the most common ones are in Oregon, North Carolina, and Michigan. Additionally, trees are imported from Canada; British Columbia is the source of Douglas fir, among other tree species.
Recent months have seen drought conditions in some areas of the nation, which have led to wildfires along the East Coast and maybe restless nights for tree farmers since roots that were not adequately hydrated in the fall might not survive.
“We were rather concerned about how it would affect this year’s trees. Fortunately, there haven’t been any problems,” Angevine-Bergs stated. “We started cutting some trees early just to see, and in November we began realizing this year’s trees are not going to be affected — taller trees have deeper roots.”
White pines, for example, grow more quickly than white fir and spruce trees, which take longer to reach the approximate 8-foot height that is generally normal for the Christmas holiday.
As growers wait for their seedlings to sprout and grow into mature trees, Sidebottom remarked, “There’s about a foot of growth a year, so you’re sitting on your money a long time.”
The time that Americans buy Christmas trees has increased, much like the holiday shopping season. A survey of 1,499 respondents conducted in August and September of last year found that a third of Americans purchased their Christmas trees the week after Thanksgiving and another third during the first week of December.
According to the poll, 16% of respondents purchased their tree during the second week of December, 14% did so prior to Thanksgiving, 3% did so during the third week, and just 1% did so on Christmas Eve.
According to Angevine-Bergs, “the trend now is earlier, even before Thanksgiving,”
“We never sold trees before Thanksgiving,” Angevine-Berg, who has been in the family for 156 years and has been selling Christmas trees since 1960, said of her approximately 50-acre farm in previous decades. We were often busy on Christmas Eve when I was a kid, so you might not be available now. There are many farms that have already sold out and closed, and many farmers are selling out earlier.