I was thinking about the poor Christmas tree farmers today and wondering about their fate. Sales are down for real trees while artificial trees are becoming more and more popular. Of the 70 million Christmas trees that will be put up in homes across our land today, about 60% of them will be fake. Sales for fake trees have been increasing 40% per decade!
If I were a Christmas tree farmer I would be very worried. Not only for the huge financial impact that would have on me, but also for the environmental impact. There are currently 1 million acres of land being farmed for Christmas trees. Scientist say that an acre of Christmas trees can supply 18 people with oxygen for a day. Not that this would happen, but if all 1 million acres were dedicated to parking lots we would lose oxygen that could support 18 million people.
What about the financial impact? Obviously, this means that times are tough for tree farmers. There are 5,000 Christmas tree farms in the United States and the industry employs roughly 100,000 Americans. This is a job lose issue as well. Families are choosing to buy something that is not a renewable resource (plastic tree) and this has impact on the little guy. Wal*Mart makes the profit by selling plastic trees from South Korea, Hong Kong, and China.
The normal American response is that these farmers need to adapt. Just like many soybean farmers have adjusted by starting to grow sod, the same could be said for tree farmers as they will need to find another cash crop to replace the unwanted product. What doesn’t work about that line of thought is that in many corners of America Christmas trees are being grown in places where other crops fail.
This is starting to look like I am being persuasive, but it is all part of a creative exercise to ask the question: What will the tree farmer do? What will his life be like when Americans get away from tradition and buy cheap, plastic, Chinese Christmas trees.
I am imagining a scene with a bitter old tree farmer still pruning his crops for the last few carloads of traditionalists who make their way to the Upper Peninsula to cut down the family Christmas tree. He is poor, angry, and sad that we have given up something beloved for something cheap and easy. In some ways the farmer is compulsively optimistic while at the same time he daily deals with the realities of his life.
As we hover over this quaint scene of a man lovingly clipping his trees, we glide towards his house. There are cars that are old. Work trucks with dry rotted tires. A barn with an old sign on it, long since unused. A small house with a broken porch. A mother in the kitchen, doing dishes. These are the same dishes from the glory days. It’s a simple life, a life they love. It is also a life that is hopeless and they are surrounded by debts and broken promises from our culture. Surely, the culture didn’t actually make a promise to them that they would sustain and reward them for providing their Christmas icon, but the feel betrayed.
The old man is secretly bitter that his craft is fading away and going the way of the Dodo bird. “Convenience, no mess, no shopping” he thinks to himself. Those American ideals have destroyed his dreams. He thinks back to the boom years when families would drive a hundred miles for one of his trees. His sons would go south to Detroit and Chicago to sell the trees that they cut themselves. Those were fond times… But times long gone.
The farmer wonders what will happen to his land. Will it become a forest or a Wal*Mart. Half of him cares while the others wishes someone would buy his land from him. These rows of pine and fir were a great place to raise a family. He taught his children to hunt here and remembers how the school bus engine would echo down the way to tell him it was time for them to come home from school.
Like a lot of things, it seems like a million miles since then and a million years. The old parking lot that used to fill up on weekends is now used for nothing. He even has to cut the grass down since it is no longer trampled by minivans and station wagons.
He could dwell on what could have been and what was. But he has work to do. A few families will surely be here in a little bit. Maybe they just got hung up at their breakfast. But surely they will come. They always do.
He waits, and he dreams, and he hopes. He checks his watch. It’s time for lunch now, so he goes in for some soup.
