Every year, as Winter tightens its grip, about eight million British householders venture into the cold, procure a tree, drag it home – and worship it.
We adorn the idol in silver and gold. We animate it with electricity, dress it with meaningful items – baubles, bells, angels, glass brussel sprouts in tiny santa hats – and attach huge moral weight to questions of tinsel. We say: “Welcome to the family” and give the tree the plum view of the TV, establishing a bond that crosses not only the species divide but the realms of the living and the dead – for the thing that brings us such cheer is already in the process of decay. In fact it was killed for our pleasure, literally cut off at the roots.
The Christmas tree ritual is perhaps the closest we come in 21st-century Britain to ritualised pagan sacrifice. It also happens to be my favourite part of Christmas – the only part that modern capitalism can’t quite poison, though Lord knows it tries. Even in an age of Pre-Lit Ultra Mountain Pine artificial trees and “Novelty Jingle Balls Adult Baubles” (£8.99 on Etsy), tree day retains its innocence. I love it all. The elemental tussle of wrestling a six-foot thing that clearly wants to be outside, inside; the resurrection of the Christmas playlist; the making of punch; the larking of children; the disinterring of the ornaments. (“Those guys from the Christmas decorations box. They’re fun, right?” as Woody reminds his fellow toys in Toy Story 3.) It all happens before Christmas has had any chance to become tedious or stressful.
So you can imagine how my heart leapt as I drove into Marldon Christmas tree farm near Torquay in Devon on a blue winter morning last week to be greeted by thousands of trees, in their own element, or close to it. The trees here are underplanted in a forest-like arrangement, most of them human-sized – three to six foot or so – but with the occasional 15-foot giant in their midst, destined for a hotel lobby or department store or town square.
Some of the trees are pre-decorated by families who have picked them out in advance; a crowd management technique because this place becomes extremely popular at weekends. Marldon’s clients have included the National Trust, the Crown Estates, the Royal Horticultural Society and 10 Downing Street, and the trees here are not the cheapest: £50 plus for a Nordmann fir. But what is on sale is rather grander than a mere tree – it is enchantment itself, complete with Alpine ski lodge, huskies, reindeer, a snow machine, and, it is rumoured, the big man himself, FC.
According to Marldon’s chief operating officer, Steve Gribbon, it costs around £1.50 to plant one Nordmann fir sapling and ten years for it to grow to a profitable size – Ben Birchall/PA Archive
“Christmas basically starts with a tree purchase, doesn’t it?” says Sadie Lynes, the founder of Christmas tree wholesalers Jadecliff, which grows around 200,000 trees across these sites in Devon, in addition to importing trees from Scotland, Ireland, Germany and Denmark for wholesale. “We see so many families come into sites like Marldon and for them it’s when Christmas begins. We all need a bit of feel-good with the climate as it is in the world. That’s what the Christmas tree symbolises. It’s the catalyst. Here we go. It’s Christmas.”
The practice of dragging evergreens into the home in midwinter actually predates Christmas. Some have interpreted this as a pagan tree worship. It seems equally feasible that our ancestors found a bit of holly, ivy and/or mistletoe cheered them up a bit during the darkest months of winter.
The modern Christmas tree ritual is, like so many Christmas rituals, a German innovation, imported to Britain by way of Prince Albert in the 1840s. As is tat. Baubles were invented in the 16th century by a German glassblower from Lauscha. Tinsel comes from 17th-century Nuremberg where it was originally made from shredded silver, though the word comes from the French étinceller, to sparkle. Apparently it was common practice in 16th-century Germany to hang Christmas trees upside down and, according to certain lifestyle influencers, this might make a quirky centrepiece to a 21st-century home – but this seems like a terrible hassle. Witch trials were also common in Germany in the 1500s too and there’s no reason to resurrect those.
In any case, Albert’s trees were the right way up. So is the Trafalgar Square tree that the citizens of Oslo donate to the citizens of London to say thanks for the war. Trees are of course a staple of Hollywood imagery too, White Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life… though my favourite Christmas tree scene in a movie is the bit in Joe Dante’s Gremlins where one of the eponymous critters stages a surprise attack from between the branches of a tree. For all their cosy domestication, trees should remain a little bit menacing – a little bit other.
As for the British Christmas tree industry, that only took root comparatively recently. Sadie Lynes entered the business thanks to her father, Keith Fletcher, who began importing trees from the Ardennes forest to sell in his greengrocers in the early 1980s. “There wasn’t a supply in the UK back in the early 1980s,” she says. “A lot of them came from Belgium and Denmark. The farmers in the UK would perhaps plant a few in a corner of a field that they couldn’t use for anything else and would then wander back ten years later to see how it was getting on.”
Spruced up: Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert, first introduced Christmas trees to Britain in the 1840s; here the family dress their 1848 festive offering – Hulton archive
The industry has seen rapid development in the 40 or years since then, many of which Lynes has spent as the head of the British Christmas Tree Growers Association, which has over 300 members. “It has gone from a product that is field-grown but without much care to a product that has been standardised. We prune, we net, we label, we palletise.”
Christmas trees tend to thrive on marginal land which makes them a tempting crop for farmers looking to maximise their land use. But they are not to be taken lightly. According to Marldon’s chief operating officer, Steve Gribbon, it costs around £1.50 to plant one Nordmann sapling and ten years for it to grow to a profitable size. “A lot of people say: ‘What do you do after Christmas?’ If only you knew!” A Nordmann requires at least two prunings a year to retain the desired rocket-like shape, both the top and bottom whirls (a “whirl” is the term for a layer of branches; the tip is called the “leader”; the soft green growth that arrives in Spring is the “flush”).
Let’s say you plant 2,000 trees in a field over ten years. You’ll have 20,000 trees to prune before the time you’ve seen a return. The costs of fertiliser and fuel have vastly increased in recent years too. “You really need to be set up well. A lot of farmers start growing trees and only later do they realise how much work is going to be involved.”
Compared to many other appalling rituals of Christmas – the mechanised slaughter of turkeys, for example, or the panic-buying of plastic nonsense on Amazon – the cultivation of millions of trees may seem comparatively benign. And yet it seems to attract undue angst. Witness the recent fracas in Italy, where various environmental associations from Trentino wrote a furious letter to the Pope urging him not to accept a 29-metre fir tree from their region for a “purely consumerist” Christmas display at the Vatican. “It is inconsistent to talk about fighting climate change and then perpetuate traditions like this, which require the elimination of such an ancient and symbolic tree.” The local mayor, Renato Girardi, pronounced himself bewildered at the fury, noting that the tree would otherwise be destined for the sawmill – as is fairly standard practise when it comes to forestry management.
The inherent absurdity of the business is not lost on Lynes. “It’s one of the most stupid business models out there, if you think about it,” she says. “You grow this thing for ten years. It has a four-week life span. And then it’s worth nothing.” Still, she’s being a little disingenuous about that. If cultivated with care, Christmas trees can be an exemplary circular business. For the ten years or so that it takes for a Nordmann fir to grow to six feet, it recycles CO2 into oxygen and provides a rich habitat for wildlife. Indeed it is precisely the sustainability of the business that attracted Gribbon to the industry.
He spent most of his career working in advertising before taking a “substantial” pay cut to come and grow Christmas trees. But as we stroll among the trees he seems almost unreasonably content. “It’s a lovely industry. When you get to the retail part, it’s nothing but smiles. And everything we do is about sustainable forestry. A lot of companies like to talk around the subject of sustainability. It’s very easy to greenwash things. But we’ve tried to look at the whole cycle.”
The trees grown here are processed in the neighbouring farm just visible over the hill, whereupon they end up as 3,000 tons of compost, used to help grow other crops: corn, wheat, more Christmas trees. Where underplanting is not possible, fields are rotated in such a way as to not strip whole areas bare in one go.
“We try and do it in such a way as to not disrupt the animals,” says Gribbon. “If it wasn’t like that, I probably wouldn’t be here.”
‘Christmas basically starts with a tree purchase’ – Russell Sach
There is another element that is not usually factored in when the benefits of real trees are compared with artificial trees – which is how useful they are for fundraising. I should confess that I have some skin in this game. In fact, I am a seasoned Christmas tree salesman. For the last six years, I have somehow landed myself in a WhatsApp group of dads who sell trees on the first weekend of December. As someone who mostly pushes words around a computer for a living, this is a thrilling insight into what it might be like to do a proper job. We rise at 5.30am or so, head out nobly into the dark with our Stanley knives and torches to manhandle 150 or so Christmas trees from their pallets on the back of a lorry and line them up around the dark playground. Then, as the sun rises, the Christmas tunes come on, bacon sandwiches are prepared and everyone parades in to buy their tree.
The camaraderie is unmatched. No one is sad to be buying a Christmas tree. The last event raised over £2,000 for the school, a margin it is hard to reproduce in, say, bake sales. “It’s an all-round win-win and a joyous occasion to boot!” says Zoe, the head of the PTA. If anyone raises a query regarding waste, I will tell them that the trees are all grown just a couple of miles away, at Frenchay Forestry just off the M32 and the Bristol Waste Company will collect them for free after Christmas whereupon they will be shredded, blended, mixed and seasoned into organic compost; there is also a local hospice that will collect trees for modest donations.
Christmas tree fashions have changed. A couple of generations ago, the Norway spruce predominated. “Considered purely as a tree, a piece of living greenery, the Norway spruce hasn’t much to commend it,” notes Richard Mabey in Flora Britannica, who quotes a vintage poem produced by a cleaning company lamenting the tendency for its needles to get everywhere: “It’s mid-July, you cry out, ‘Waiter / What’s this in my soup?’ / He replies ‘Norwegian Tarragon / According to the cook’”.
Today, over 80 per cent of all Christmas trees sold in the UK are Nordmanns. This is a hardier variety that was apparently “discovered” by the Finnish botanist Alexander von Nordmann on a trip to the Caucasus in the 1830s (presumably the locals had been wondering what those green pointy things were.) The Nordmann has much to recommend it: its shapely whirls, its pert leader, its excellent needle retention. But much like a supermarket apple, its hardiness comes at the cost of character. It has almost no aroma, unlike the Norway spruce, which in turn has nothing to the “incredible scent” of the Noble fir, Lynes assures me. She imports these from Ireland. “If we can’t produce a tree ourselves, we try to buy them from where they thrive.” The chic thing these days would be to source a rare breed: a Fraser fir, a koreana, a lasiocarpa fir, a lodgepole pine.
There are of course commercial pressures on the Christmas tree. One is that everyone wants their trees up much sooner: “In my father’s day, we never sold a tree wholesale until the sixth of December. Now our wholesale season is already finished,” says Lynes. The thing is, the earlier you put up your tree, the sooner it will die. Lynes’s advice is to put it in water and replenish regularly; keep it away from any heat sources – underfloor heating is deadly – and ideally slice a layer off the bottom of the tree midway through the season to allow it to take in more water. “We try to say to our customers, ‘come on, you’ve got to look after your tree.’”
Every year, millions of us hunt down our perfect Christmas tree – Rui Vieira/PA Wire
The primacy of the Nordmann has been challenged in recent years by the rise of artificial trees, which like artificial lawns and AI friends are increasingly hard to distinguish from the real thing. My parents were delighted that it took my sisters and me three years to notice that their tree spent most of the year disassembled in the attic. According to a YouGov survey, 60 per cent of British people planned to use an existing fake tree over Christmas 2022 and seven per cent intended to buy a new one, compared to 15 per cent who intended to buy a real tree. Interestingly, 54 per cent considered the artificial tree to be more environmentally friendly. In fact, it is estimated that it would need to be reused at least seven times for it to have a smaller carbon footprint – and this doesn’t take in such benefits as local employment, composting, charity fundraisings, nor the forever plastics in fake trees.
Still, Lynes is less concerned about fake trees than she is about supermarkets devaluing real trees and exploiting farmers. Lidl is currently advertising £11.99 pot grown trees. Tesco is offering half-price trees to Clubcard customers. “They’re kind of ruining the industry,” Lynes says. “At a farm or a garden centre, you can see the trees and you’ll know they’re fresh. You’ve got some degree of expertise too. Whereas the supermarkets are not really engaged with the products. It’s just there to help footfall. You don’t know how long it’s been sitting there. The margins are small and if they don’t sell them they’ll push it back to the farmers and farmers can’t live like that.” Many Christmas tree farmers have been left exposed by the collapse of Homebase, which has gone into administration.
But this is another reason why farms like Marldon are leaning so heavily on the experience of buying the tree. “Christmas basically starts with a tree purchase. I had a friend who bought her house based on where the tree would go at Christmas. For her that was really special.” Gribbon says that many local families come for the day and don’t actually buy a tree at all and he’s fine with that. “You can see, for them, it’s just an amazing day out. It might be their Christmas. You can see it’s a tradition for them and it’s harking back to the traditions of their childhood.”
It’s the ritual enchantment that’s the thing. T.S. Eliot wrote a late masterpiece called The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, in which he recalled the “the glittering rapture, the amazement / Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree.” For the 66-year-old Eliot those memories, unboxed each year, were “not be forgotten in later experience, / In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium / The awareness of death, [or] the consciousness of failure.”
The trees are themselves enormous metaphors. They sit there flashing in our homes, half-raves, half-shrines, reminders that none of us have long before our needles drop.
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