Branching Out : Artificial Christmas Trees Grow in Popularity

Ten years ago or so, Vicki Glogauer would drive out to a local Christmas tree lot, pick a majestic, sweet-smelling pine and lug it back to her house for the holiday season.

Then she got smart.

“The real ones smell good, but by New Year’s Day, the needles are everywhere and it all falls apart,” said Glogauer, of Newbury Park, who now owns an artificial tree that she sets up at Thanksgiving and stores away after the first of the year.

“Besides,” she said, “the real ones aren’t as perfect.”

Much to the distress of Christmas tree farmers, sales of artificial Christmas trees have been rising steadily nationally since the 1970s, and lately have surpassed sales of the real McCoy.

A 1992 Gallup Poll conducted for the Christmas Tree Assn. figured that 35.4 million American households purchased real trees last year, while 38.8 million set up artificial ones.

Officials at the nationwide growers association say the trend is strongest in the southeastern United States. In California, they say, about 80% of Christmas tree owners buy “live-cut” trees.

Interviews with consumers and tree sellers around Ventura County on Thursday suggest, however, that artificial trees are beginning to catch on here as well.

“We do do a tremendous business in artificial trees,” said Norm Grow, manager of the Target store in Oxnard. “This will be my fourth Christmas season at this store, and each year, we turn up 10% more in sales of artificial trees.”

The reasons for buying an artificial tree, buyers and sellers say, range from fear of the tree catching fire to the mess created by shedding needles. Some people are allergic to pine trees, and others believe that artificial trees are more ecologically sound. The last reason, at least, is totally mistaken, Christmas Tree Assn. officials insist.

“We think people misunderstand,” said David Baumann, executive director of the Milwaukee-based organization. “People think tree sellers cut trees out of the forests.”

In actuality, Baumann said, 95% of all real Christmas trees are grown on professional tree farms. And for every tree chopped down, about three seedlings are planted, he said, making Christmas tree farms an environmental plus.

“Growing trees replenish oxygen and clean the air of carbon dioxide,” he said.

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Baumann acknowledges that Christmas tree growers suffer from a public relations problem, relative at least to their artificial nemeses.

“In the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was always a real Christmas tree shortage and that allowed the artificials to gain a foothold,” he said.

Since then, he said, “the (growers’) industry has not really come to grips with battling the marketing of artificial trees.”

Thousand Oaks tree seller Steve Swiertz, though, said there’s another, more obvious reason for the decreasing popularity of the real trees--a decline in quality.

Swiertz, longtime owner of Cal Seasons Christmas Trees on Thousand Oaks Boulevard, said he has noticed in recent years that the trees he buys from Oregon and Washington have been drier, indicating that they were cut earlier and will lose their needles sooner.

“Twenty years ago, a Douglas fir would last three weeks easy, but now it’s 10 days,” he said. “The Nobles would last four to six weeks and still be fresh the day you took them down. Now, no.”

He blamed the problem on greedy growers who cut trees as early as the first week in November to ship as many as possible by Christmastime.

“They’re slitting their own throats,” Swiertz said. “People are getting sick and tired of paying good, hard-earned money and having their tree die on the 25th.”

Bill Dewey, assistant nursery manager at Green Thumb in Ventura, strongly disagrees. “We’ve been in the business here for 30 years and, even in the drought years, we never experienced anything like that.”

Of the 6,500 real trees the business sold this year, only four or five were returned because they were dried out, he said.

Still, for whatever reason, artificial trees remain popular among Ventura County residents.

Estella Paez of Oxnard bought a real tree this year at the behest of her 27-year-old son, but favors the artificial tree she paid $20 for in 1969. Until this season, she had used the artificial tree each year.

“The new tree looks real good and smells nice,” she said. “But I look at my old tree in the box and it still looks really good. We used to have fun setting it up.”

Artificial trees have come a long way, of course, since Paez bought hers. The wiry, spindly, often obviously fake products have become so lush, full and green that shoppers must touch them before determining that they are mere imitations. Although the best artificial trees begin at about $50 and run up to $500, small versions can be purchased starting at $4.99 in some stores.

For those who say they will miss that fresh-cut, evergreen scent, merchants have a solution for that, too--bottled pine aroma concentrate. A few ounces of the concentrate--which, when sprayed into the air, smell like pine trees drenched in ammonia--retails at K Mart in Thousand Oaks for $2.39.

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The lure of artificial trees has enticed some of the most devoted Christmas tree aficionados.

“As a kid, we always had real trees and, when my parents bought a fake one, my world came tumbling down,” said Ron Terrinoni, operations manager at the Thousand Oaks K Mart, which sells both real and artificial trees.

“Now,” he admitted, “I have one.”

Terrinoni said that his fake tree “looks fine,” and that house guests often mistake it for the real thing. “This time of year, I don’t have the time for Christmas tree shopping,” he said. “It was convenient.”

Another store manager, Roy Swenson, overhearing Terrinoni’s comments, jumped in, saying that he and his family switched back this year from an artificial to a real tree.

“It just didn’t have the scent,” he said. “It makes Christmas feel more real when you have a real tree.”