To most people, Christmas means gifts and cinnamon and woodsmoke. Snow and pine needles. Sleds and sleigh bells. Goodwill to all.
To Danielle Firkus, it means memories of planting and shaping trees, selling them on chilly evenings and sitting with family for hours making Christmas decorations to sell. Firkus grew up on a Christmas tree farm in Minnesota before moving to Richmond for pharmacy school. “I loved it,” she recalls. “Some of my favorite memories are of spending time with my family on the farm.”
That rings true to Tyler Carroll, 36. His parents own Claybrooke Farm in Louisa County, where they grow and sell Christmas trees. Tyler and his brother, Matt, 39, have spent their lives taking part in the trade of farming trees. That meant weekends and holidays tending firs and spruces and pines — trees that might take a decade to reach maturity.
People have a lot of ideas about Christmas farms. “People think we live in a Hallmark movie,” Tyler Carroll says. Nope. Let’s put it this way: Hallmark movies rarely involve bush hogs. Christmas tree farms do. A lot of people believe Christmas trees grow in forests and are cut by hardy lumberjacks. Nope. That was true until the 1970s, but it no longer is. These days, Christmas trees are farmed and harvested like other crops.
(From left) Coley, Matthew and Emmet Carroll plant trees. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
The Carrolls have been in the trade since 1984, the year Matt was born. That first year, the family planted 500 white pine seedlings. They spent the next six years tending the trees on weekends. By 1990 those seedlings had grown to 6 and 7 feet — just big enough to sell — and the family had been joined by another child. That Christmas, they put out the word, built a bonfire and sold about 75 trees.
Virginia Carroll’s family has owned the farm since the 1940s. Back then, they raised cattle. After she married and inherited the land, the couple decided to devote part of it to growing Christmas trees. (Another portion is leased to other farmers.)
Growing trees made sense for the family, says Virginia’s husband, John. Christmas trees don’t need daily care the way cattle do — important because his job meant the family was based in the Roanoke area for many years. Plus, as a longtime employee of the Department of Forestry, John knew trees a lot better than he knew cattle.
Today, the Carrolls’ tree farm comprises 25 acres of Christmas trees growing in tidy rows. The white pines they grew at first have made way for other trees as Christmas preferences have changed. Their top seller is the Canaan fir, a cross between a balsam and a Fraser fir that hails originally from West Virginia. The Carrolls also grow concolor firs and blue spruces, and have been experimenting with Nordmann firs, a hardy tree that does well in hot, dry weather.
The success of that experiment remains to be seen. “I knew they grew slow,” John grumbles. “I didn’t know it grew that slow.”
Christmas tree farming is a year-round business. It starts in January with field cleanup — “a stump-cutting party,” John calls it. In March, seedlings go into the ground. This is perhaps the most important decision the farmers can make in a year. Plant too few trees, and there won’t be enough to sell in a decade. Plant too many, and 10 years later you might end up with a glut. This is what happened in 2008 — there were so many Christmas trees for sale that prices collapsed, putting many farmers into bankruptcy.
After planting, the work moves through spring with mowing and, when needed, spraying with pesticides and fungicides (an almost universal practice because trees have such long lives and are supposed to look perfect). In summer, it’s time to shear trees, shaping them into Christmas-friendly conical silhouettes with a machete-like lopper or an electric pruning device.
As autumn arrives, the pace picks up with identifying and tagging trees they plan to sell and ordering supplies. And, crucially, planning ways to entertain customers who want to create a family memory: straw mazes, Brunswick stew, hayrides, apple butter, hot chocolate.
Christmas tree farming is a family affair at Claybrooke Farm: (from left) Charley Gail (Matthew’s wife); John Carroll; Tyler Carroll; Virginia Carroll; Emmet, 6; Matthew Carroll; and Coley, 8 (Photo by Ash Daniel)
When they started it, the Carrolls thought the goal of their family farm would be growing trees and finding customers. They learned otherwise pretty quickly. Managing a successful Christmas tree farm “is not about selling a tree,” says John Carroll. “It’s about the kids and the whole family having an experience.”
The ritual of the Christmas tree runs deep for many families: the scent of cut wood and pine, the joy of bringing a piece of winter wilderness inside the home. It’s a time-honored, all-American tradition.
Well, no. Dragging a tree inside the house and covering it with decorations? The idea would have seemed like rank paganism to the Pilgrims. The thought also would have befuddled just about every American until right before the Civil War.
Although Christmas trees were first recorded in 16th-century Germany, the custom was little known elsewhere. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the Christmas tree began to, uh, take root in the U.S. In 1846, a magazine published an illustration of Queen Victoria posing with a decorated tree along with her much-loved husband, Prince Albert, and their children. (Albert was German and thus familiar with the custom.) The image enchanted Britain, and before you could say “viral meme,” the custom spread to Anglophilic East Coast America.
In the years that followed, Christmas trees became essential elements of the iconography of the country’s most popular holiday. Soon the decorated tree was as important to our understanding of Christmas as jolly, jelly-bellied Santa Claus and his flying reindeer — two other striking images that date to the 19th century.
Now, although Christmas is almost 2,000 years older than Christmas trees, it is difficult to think of the holiday without them. That fact has launched big business — Christmas tree sales will total more than $1.3 billion this year, according to the USDA.
Despite what one might assume, the live-tree market is holding steady against the onslaught of artificial trees. Each year, more than 25 million real Christmas trees are sold in the U.S., says the National Christmas Tree Association, which represents more than 700 farms nationwide. Christmas trees are grown in all 50 U.S. states; the trees thrive in rocky, mountainous terrain unsuitable for other crops; and local tree farms employ local people and contribute to local economies.
In addition, points out Tim O’Connor, the association’s executive director, “Every tree takes seven to 10 years to grow, and that whole time they are turning CO2 into oxygen. Compare that to an artificial tree made of plastic.”
O’Connor, who has led the association since 2015, says “artificial tree” the way other people would say “fungal infection.” He reluctantly acknowledged his parents had an artificial tree when he was growing up. But he never loved it. “I just like trees. I always have,” he says.
The fact is, despite the family-friendly face of the Christmas tree industry, the trees most people buy are the products of huge farms. These farms are concentrated in six counties in two states, North Carolina and Oregon, which together produce more than half the Christmas trees sold in the U.S. The largest Christmas tree farm in the world, Holiday Tree Farm in Oregon, harvests about a million trees every year and employs 800 people. Megafarms like Holiday Tree provide the trees you’ll find every Yule in supermarket lots and at the big hardware chains, cut, bagged and ready to take home — the industry term is “pre-cut.”
By contrast, local farms like Claybrooke sell trees that are selected by the customer in the field and cut on the spot. The industry calls these “u-cut” trees. Most Christmas trees grown in Virginia — worth $10 million a year, according to the Department of Forestry — are u-cut.
That is a very different business. Instead of trying to crank out as many trees as possible at the lowest price possible, u-cut farms emphasize the fun and togetherness of getting the tree.
At Woods Tree Farm in Amelia Court House, Christmas-tree hunters can expect a full holiday-outing experience: a fire pit, hayrides, hot chocolate, s’mores, photos with Santa, selfie stations with props. “We try to go all out,” says Phil Woods, the proprietor. “It’s more than just cutting a tree.”
Phil and Stacey Woods, daughter Caroline and son Hudson founded Woods Tree Farm five years ago. (Photo courtesy Woods Tree Farm)
Woods, a digital marketer by trade, got into the Christmas tree business five years ago with, he cheerfully acknowledges, “no background or experience at all.” A Delaware native, Woods came to Virginia because his wife, Stacey, works at Capital One and her family has roots in the Richmond area. He thought there could be a good opportunity in founding and marketing a Christmas tree farm. To find out, they bought 43 acres of land — mostly because it featured a picturesque hill and pond — and started planting.
Running a farm takes a lot more than marketing, as Woods soon discovered. In 2019, their first year, they planted 3,800 seedlings. Fewer than a third of them survived. Woods found himself deep in the study of how to grow trees — soil nutrients, sunlight, drought. A few years later, an infestation of grubs killed or stunted many of the trees.
Woods documented his learning curve on YouTube. The channel is a marketing tool, of course. But he says his videos have turned into an informal training ground. Whenever he posts about a problem, fellow farmers chime in with comments — and usually with suggestions and solutions. “Christmas tree growers tend to be a friendly bunch,” he says.
After five years in the field, so to speak, Woods is an evangelist for it. He admitted there’s little money to be gained at the scale of farming he’s doing — after expenses there’s not a lot of profit in selling maybe 1,000 trees a year for $75 each. “We want families to go out and have a real Christmas experience together, year after year. If we want this tradition to continue, we have to keep it up.”
Woods’ children now are 7 and 12. Will they carry on the tradition? He hopes so. “It’s kind of a passion project now,” Woods says. “This tradition needs to live on.”
That may be difficult. O’Connor of the National Christmas Tree Association says the biggest challenge facing the industry is not cheap foreign-made plastic trees or grubs or even poor soil nutrition. It’s old age. Many Christmas tree farms aren’t being carried on by the farmers’ children. “There are older growers who don’t have a younger generation behind them,” O’Connor says.
Growing Christmas trees may be rewarding, but it’s also a time-consuming commitment. “I love that we are a huge part of so many families’ traditions,” says Danielle Firkus, who recently moved back to the Midwest to be closer to her family and the farm, and still helps out during the Christmas season. But she now has a career as a pharmacist and can’t envision taking on the year-round labor of running a farm — especially not at the scale her grandparents did. “I don’t think any of us would have the ability to do that,” she says.
The Carrolls of Claybrooke Farm say they hope to buck that trend. After years in Roanoke, the family moved in 1993 to Prince George County partly so they could be closer to the farm. Now, 30 years later, Matt Carroll, the older son, is planning to build his family’s home on the farmland. Tyler Carroll, who holds an MBA from Virginia Commonwealth University and during the week works as a manager at the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, is applying his business acumen to the farm. He focuses as much on marketing, diversification and occasional corporate events as on the trees themselves. “It started as a way to support my brother and I,” he says. “And as I’ve gotten older, my passion for the business has grown.”
The family has continued to invest and innovate. In 2014, the Carrolls built a photo-friendly, rustic-looking salesroom for the Christmas-tree season, complete with reclaimed barn wood and original, weather-beaten signs.
They’ve changed with the times, too. After being startled in 2019 to find 140 cars arriving simultaneously on opening weekend, the Carrolls revised their sales model and now require reservations. They worried that customers would balk. So far it’s worked out well. “It’s a better experience for everybody,” John Carroll says.
The farm has become part of the area’s culture. Its trees have graced the Virginia Executive Mansion three times — John Carroll recalled being surprised to spot then-Gov. Ralph Northam waiting in line at the farm to buy Christmas goods. In 2020, the Carrolls provided the Christmas tree for the Virginia Capitol, a 27-foot Norway spruce that stood among the columns.
But the family says the best part of their year is always the weeks after Thanksgiving, when families arrive to find their perfect tree. Many are familiar faces. Some have made the trip out to the farm for three generations. “It’s like a little family reunion sometimes,” John Carroll says. “It’s extremely satisfying to us that both of our two boys are interested in this.”
As warm drinks flow, the families are tractored out to the field to admire and choose a tree. Sometimes the family cuts it themselves; often a worker will do that for them. Then the chosen, just-right tree is bound with twine and bundled onto a car for the trip home, where its branches will be garlanded with lights and bedecked with ornaments.
And all this because a family grew it over years of toil and care. “It’s the best feeling in the world,” Virginia Carroll says.
Christmas Tree TLC
Tim O’Connor of the National Christmas Tree Association shares tips for keeping your live Christmas tree in good shape throughout the season.
- Pick a green tree. That means it’s fresh and in good health. Touch the tree — soft needles are a good sign.
- Get a fresh cut. If your tree has not just been cut, have the vendor or assistant cut about half an inch off the bottom of the trunk. This helps it take in water.
- Put it in water. Most species will be OK up to eight hours out of water, but after that, they start to dry out. If needed, a tree can be kept outside in cold weather for a few days.
- Treat it like a vase of flowers. Check the water level regularly and top it up as needed.
- Keep it away from heat sources. Fireplaces, heating vents and direct sunlight dry out a tree.
Find a Farm
Firever Pines in Ruther Glen (Photo courtesy Firever Pines)
912 Elk Creek Road, Mineral
U-cut Canaan, concolor and Nordmann firs; blue spruces. Reservations required.
5349 Jericho Road, Ruther Glen
U-cut Blue Ice cypress; pre-cut Fraser, Canaan and concolor firs; wreaths, garlands and swags also available. Open 12 to 5 p.m. and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through Dec. 17.
Holly Berry Christmas Tree Farm
3901 Fordham Road
Pre-cut Fraser firs and white pines; stands and wreaths also available. Open noon to 8 p.m. Monday to Friday and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.
15110 Elm Cottage Road, Amelia Court House
U-cut Scotch or white pine. Open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays until Christmas.
94 Cartersville Road, Cumberland
Pre-cut Frasier firs; pictures with Santa, hayrides, gifts and snacks also available. Open noon to 5 p.m. Friday to Sunday, starting Dec. 1.
15580 Five Forks Road, Amelia Court House
Pre-cut Fraser firs, blue spruces and white pines; wreaths, handmade crafts, decorations, refreshments and photo ops with animals also available. Open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Dec. 9 and 10.
13941 Clement Town Road, Amelia Court House
Limited supply of u-cut trees (advance deposit required); pre-cut firs, decorations, ornaments and refreshments also available. Open Saturdays and Sundays while supplies last.
