How to choose and decorate an American Christmas tree
'30.11.2018'
ForumDaily Woman
Despite the extremely pronounced seasonality, Christmas tree business in America is booming. Sales are slightly less than 30 million trees per year (27 million were sold last year), bringing in more than one billion dollars in revenue. Popular among Americans are the most different types of fir trees, including blue ones. The main requirement is the ability of the tree not to drop pine needles for a long time.
Most Christmas trees, more precisely, "Christmas trees", are produced and sold in the northwestern states of Oregon and Washington. In addition to the purely Christmas tree business, the owners of farms are engaged in the manufacture and sale of bouquets, wreaths and garlands of branches. The latter can hang “as if they were alive” for two months, provided that they are not exposed to direct sunlight, says Svetlana Senenko for Zn.ua.
The price of the American Christmas tree ranges from 15 to 120 dollars, depending on the size, type of tree and region of the country. According to the National Association of Christmas Trees (there is such, and, of course, this is not a government agency), last year the average price of a live American tree was 42 dollars. 60 cents, while the average price of an artificial Christmas tree was 96 dollars. .Numx cents. The size of the trees sold varies from 50 cm to four meters. Fir-tree farms not only bring felled trees and branches to shops and street bazaars, but also invite buyers to come to their places.
In many American families, a Christmas tree trip is a traditional family-wide event held on a weekend day, which is taken with children and dogs, carefully choosing a tree in size, color, breed, shape and, of course, price. If desired, you can cut it yourself - the tool will provide immediately on the farm.
This procedure is considered by both parties to the transaction as an additional pleasure for the buyer, not as a seller’s labor savings, and does not affect the price. Freshly sawn trees smell better, last longer, and are usually cheaper at the price than those bought in the city.
Not far from us is just such a farm. Her mistress, an elderly woman, inherited the farm from her father, who founded it more than forty years ago. By profession, she is a teacher, and while her father was alive, she regularly organized excursions to her father’s farm for her students, showing them how real Christmas trees grow and how some species of trees differ from others. Well, after the death of her father, she took the family business into her own hands, considering the current occupation as an early pension, which also brings income. She likes to spend time on the air and do feasible physical labor. According to her, the most pleasant thing is to meet their regular customers from year to year. Every time she is amazed how during this time their children grew and changed ...
To grow the perfect Christmas tree, several conditions are required. Suitable soil, high-quality seeds, fertilizers, as well as pruning branches to achieve the correct shape. Many farmers in our district, following the fashion for everything “organic”, basically do not use pesticides, and for the destruction of harmful insects they annually purchase a batch of ladybirds, which they send by mail from California.
The most formidable competitors to Christmas tree farms are artificial Christmas trees, made, as usual, in China, where they have recently learned how to make them very realistic, just like living ones. About 50 of millions of American families have already acquired at least one artificial Christmas tree. Saps Christmas business and bad weather.
In especially dry years, farmers can lose up to 60% of last year’s saplings ... Genetics come to the rescue, bringing new varieties of drought-resistant trees with needles of a wide variety of colors and shades that can not crumble for a long time. Supports Christmas business and the notorious spirit of consumerism, inventing new trends. So, a few years ago in the States went the fashion to buy and install two Christmas trees at once. One is installed in the living room, and the second - in the bedroom or nursery, and even on the veranda or balcony. It is said that the fashion for more than one tree went from the abundance of Christmas-tree decorations accumulated in families over the years.
It is quite understandable, once you find yourself in a row of Christmas tree decorations in any American store, you’re running up, and you want to buy this beauty, and that one — even if you have a few Christmas tree boxes on the mezzanine or in the attic toys ...
Following the initiative of environmental organizations, the second decade in America after the Christmas and New Year holidays, discarded trees are harvested and processed for fertilizer (compost) or used as source material for decorating the backyard, sub-urban, urban or suburban landscape (landscaping).
The crushed needles and wood are mixed with the earth to make the soil more porous, or sprinkled on top for better retention of moisture. Environmentalists use Christmas sawdust for sprinkling soil in roadside and other areas where it is exposed due to human activity. Another environmental trend is to buy a tree with roots and dig in its own yard. Such reusable Christmas trees are usually decorated with electric garlands. By the way, according to environmentalists, when instead of corn farmers begin to grow coniferous trees, the erosion process stops at this site and the soil as a whole improves.
However, as it always happens, there is a dark side in the Christmas tradition. Every year, festively decorated Christmas trees in houses cause fires. According to statistics, each season in the country there are more than five hundred fires, causing a total damage of an average 20 million dollars ...
A lot of local museums in small American towns open on the eve of Christmas exposition dedicated to decorated Christmas trees, thereby creating a new tradition: family visits to the museum for the Christmas holidays. Many schools, especially primary ones, set up Christmas trees and offer schoolchildren educational projects on making ornaments for them with their own hands with the help of imagination and effort.
One of the most popular trends is making Christmas-tree decorations with your own photos.
Older students use the Christmas season for targeted fundraising, in particular for traveling to Europe. To do this, they contract to bring the purchased Christmas trees to the machines for a small fee. Typically, young porters report to potential customers about their plans for this earnings with the help of self-made posters attached to jackets. To use their services or not is a purely voluntary matter, but the pre-holiday mood makes many people generous.
Since for the overwhelming number of Americans the Christmas tree is an attribute of Christmas, not of the New Year, the prices for Christmas trees fall sharply after December 24, which allows people from the former Soviet Union who celebrate the winter holidays in the old manner to save on the Christmas tree.
However, many of them, even non-Christians, join the common holiday and set up Christmas trees on the eve of the Catholic Protestant Christmas. After all, American Christmas is the least religious holiday, and elegant Christmas trees and gifts under them delight people of all nationalities, religions and ages.
Wedding Crashers
Raise your hand if you're one of those who love real live Christmas trees, offers KCRA. We are with you! There is nothing similar to the magical feeling when you go to the farm to find Tus Sayolya, bring her home, install and put a Christmas star or a festive angel on top of her head. And what about the fragrance that hovers in the house until the end of the season ...
But there is one rather large nuisance that is best eliminated in a timely manner so as not to spoil the whole holiday for yourself: uninvited guests can enter the dwelling with the tree. Therefore, before you bring the tree into the house, make sure that there are no insects on it!
The bugs in the tree remain dormant during the colder months, so you might not notice them at first. But as soon as the tree is inside a warm house, the insects will wake up. Just imagine - up to 25 thousand bugs can live in one tree!
Who to look for?
- Aphids (aphids) are small brown and black beetles with six legs, some of them have wings.
- Hermes (adelgids) produce small white masses that pull moisture from spruce needles.
- If you notice tiny red spots crawling on your tree, these are probably scale insects.
- The name of bark beetles (bark beetles) speaks for itself: these dark brown bugs burrow into tree trunks.
- Other varieties of “guests” include psocids (small winged gray creatures), praying mantises, and mites (mites and ticks).
The good news: if you take a tree on the farm, as a rule, there are mechanical devices that allow you to get rid of insects in advance. But to make sure that unwanted guests did not get to your house, look at the tree with a flashlight. After examining it for the first time, leave the wood in the garage for an hour, then inspect it again. Until the end of the season, regularly inspect the floor around the tree.
What shouldn't you do? Use bug sprays. They are highly flammable - a few insects are nothing compared to a flaming Christmas tree.
