If you tried to buy a Christmas tree in the past few weeks, it probably wasn’t easy. Christmas tree farms statewide report selling out earlier than ever, the result of a pandemic-related boost in customers.
“It’s been two weeks since we’ve had trees,” said Cheryl Werner of the Werner Tree Farm in Middlebury. “Normally, we’re open up until Christmas Eve.”
Vermont sellers report sales that, in line with national trends this holiday season, more people are buying trees than ever before, and earlier than ever before.
Werner said she thinks the early sales were a result of people being more anxious to get some Christmas cheer in their homes during the pandemic, and an influx of people moving to Vermont from cities that were Covid hotspots in March and April.
From a business perspective, Werner said, it was a great season — but she feels badly for people who couldn’t get a tree.
“We weren’t happy with not being able to provide trees to everybody who needed them these last few weeks,” Werner said. “And there’s this kind of shortage everywhere — there weren’t a lot of places to refer people to.”
At The Russell Farm in Starksboro, tree sales closed on Dec. 13. Leading up to that, the Russells were so overwhelmed, they had to open up beyond their usual weekend hours — adding Wednesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons — to accommodate the surge in customers, and to make sure those customers were able to spread out while tree-shopping.
“I was pleasantly surprised,” said David Russell, who runs the farm. “We probably had a dozen people out looking for trees the weekend before we even opened. People have been cooped up for so long, they were really looking forward to the holiday season where they could do their traditions and light up their home.”
A few sellers said they worried some of the extra customers were a bad sign, in terms of the governor’s Covid restrictions being followed.
“There were definitely a few people coming in from Massachusetts and Connecticut, and you don’t realize it until they say, ‘Oh we just got into town today,’” said Tom Paine of Paine’s Christmas Trees in Morristown.
Paine said tree-sellers’ expenses were a lot higher this year because of the pandemic, what with redesigning the farm layout to accommodate for social distancing and sanitizing, plus a huge reduction in gift shop sales.
Paine said his farm’s tree prices reflected those costs — at $4 more per tree.
“But overall, this was a very good year for us, no complaints,” Paine said.
It was an even better year for Vermont tree growers who sell in bulk.
“If I had the trees to sell and the labor to sell them, the sky was the limit,” said Steve Moffatt of Moffatt’s Tree Farm in Craftsbury. He sells to wholesalers who sell Vermont trees up and down the East Coast. “The phone was always ringing. I was getting emails on a daily business of people looking for trees,” Moffatt said.
Moffatt said a lot of his customers have stuck with his farm, even in bad years when they could have gotten their trees for a lot less money, so he decided not to raise his prices this year, out of loyalty to them. But he said he easily could have, given the market.
“It would have been easy to ask for a lot more,” he said. “Price didn’t seem to be a question at all; it was just a question of if you had trees.”
In years past, he said, the grade of the tree also mattered a lot. People were looking to buy the best premium trees. This year, he said, lower-grade trees were selling just as quickly as the highest-quality stock by the end of the season.
Moffatt thinks two big things happened with tree sales this year. The first is increased demand. In other words, the pandemic, which made people who might have settled for an artificial tree in years past opt for the nostalgia of a real tree.
The other factor, he said, is that the actual supply of trees was somewhat short.
“Christmas tree supply rides a pretty dramatic wave,” Moffatt said. “There’s a natural cycle to it. There are years where you can’t sell your trees because there’s just trees everywhere, and when that happens, you aren’t going to plant a bunch more trees.”
It takes at least 10 years for a Christmas tree to grow to maturity. Back when 2020 Christmas trees were being planted, the country was still feeling the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, and tree planting likely reflected that.
Moffatt said he’s also heard figures that put the average age of a Christmas tree farmer at 75 years old, and he suspects that, as his generation of growers gets older, they’ll be planting fewer and fewer trees, which could make it hard to keep up with demand.
“It was a crazy season because we didn’t know if it was going to be a good year or not,” Moffatt said. “I need customers to be committed in October, and I’d call them and say, ‘Listen, you need to make a decision. None of us can predict the future, but I think you’re going to sell trees.’
“I feel very fortunate that prediction turned out to be right.”
