If there is anything that brings back Christmas memories for me, is the smell of freshly cut evergreens around this time of the year, especially the smell of a freshly cut Tennessee cedar tree. I was walking through one of our home building supply store’s garden area the other day and they had fresh cut Christmas trees all stacked up in a line for shoppers to take home for this year’s Christmas celebration. I took a stroll down “memory lane” as I walked among the spruce, firs and pines all laying there waiting for a family to take them home. Didn’t smell or see any Tennessee cedars, but it did smell good all the same. This modern-day method of acquiring a Christmas tree has come a long way from going out in the back lot thicket and chopping down a cedar tree and dragging it to the house.
One of my favorite country Christmas songs is “Tennessee Christmas” and in that song the chorus uses the lyrics, “A tender Tennessee Christmas, is the only Christmas for me.” That song pretty much describes the Christmases I enjoyed as a child, but find it a little more difficult to accomplish each year with all of our modern-day merchandising. But, I still attempt to keep as much tradition as I can.
In those early years, we would put our tree up after we all got out of school for Christmas vacation. It would always be a cedar that we would walk for hours in our woods to locate. We must have looked at thousands of trees before finding the perfect one. They would either be too tall, too short, double-forked, one side missing branches, or too many branches at the bottom that when you sawed one off to put it in the stand, a giant hole would appear. It was a tough job to find the perfect tree, but it also was a Tennessee Christmas tradition.
Today, not everyone has a farm to locate a perfect tree on, but you can still keep this Tennessee tradition by visiting a Tennessee Christmas tree farm and help the environment as well. Rob Beets, marketing specialist with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, recommends Tennessee’s Christmas tree farmers as a good source for your tree this year. Beets says, “When you choose a natural Christmas tree from a local Tennessee farm, you do the planet a favor “” and you give yourself a holiday treat, too. Christmas tree farms grow a completely renewable and recyclable resource, which contains no petroleum products and leaves a very small carbon footprint.”
Beets also reports that natural Christmas trees can be found close to your home, waiting to be transported from the farm to your living room. While they’re growing, natural Christmas trees absorb carbon dioxide and other gases and emit fresh oxygen. Christmas trees are often grown on soil that doesn’t support other crops, and their root systems serve to stabilize soil, protect area water quality and provide refuge for wildlife. Grown on farms just like any other crop, one to three new seedlings are planted for every tree harvested to ensure a constant supply.
With approximately 50 or more Christmas tree farms spread statewide, this would be a good year to make the Tennessee Christmas tree farm experience a Tennessee tradition at your house. It is a sure way of getting a fresh tree with a lot of that Christmas tree fragrance that helps make Christmas time special. And with the official Christmas season being a short one this year, only four weeks from Thanksgiving Day to Christmas Eve, you had better get busy finding that perfect tree. Go to www.picktnproducts.org to see a directory listing of Christmas tree farms located in Tennessee. The directory listings will include the kinds of trees grown, location, phone numbers and other products and activities that might be available at a given farm.
Just as the song implies, I hope you all have a tender Tennessee Christmas. And, a Tennessee farm grown Christmas tree would make it even more tender and memorable.