Pining for Christmas

Strain's Tree Farm near Lordsburg continues a Christmas-tree tradition that may predate even Christmas.

By David A. Fryxell / Photos by Lisa D. Fryxell

The flat gray slab of Hwy. 70, unrolling arrow-straight between the mountain ranges northwest of Lordsburg, seems like the last place on earth anyone would come looking for Christmas. But then, a few dull miles shy of the Arizona line, you hang a right onto Hwy. 92 towards the tiny town of Virden, NM, and suddenly the landscape changes. Dipping down toward the Gila River valley, the highway curves and humps and flirts with towering clumps of cottonwoods, still tinged with green even in late fall. The sunny autumn morning, warming toward shirtsleeve weather, suggests Indian summer more than Santa Claus. But we're getting somewhere.

About 3,000 Christmas trees grow in the Gila River valley at Strain's Tree Farm in Virden, NM.

The "where" turns out to be Strain's Tree Farm, a newish house and another blaze of fall colors on the left side of the road as it snakes through Virden on the way to Duncan, Ariz. It's the sort of place and the sort of day where you'd expect to be buying apple cider or pecans, not Christmas trees. And at first the only evergreen you see is in Mike Strain's backyard, a live tree like the ones he and his brother Walt sell, which was the family holiday tree a few seasons back. Sure enough, too, there's a grove of pecans (no apple trees, though) and another of pistachios. To find the Christmas trees–almost 3,000 in all–you have to peer farther back from the highway, to where they grow in long straight lines that look drawn by a giant green marker, rising from smallest to tallest as the rows stretch away from the house.

Unseen beyond the tallest row is this fall's crop of seedlings, beginning new rows that will be somebody's Christmas trees in about 2009 or 2010. The Strains plant some 500 six-inch-high Afghan pine seedlings each fall, another 500 every spring. Starting in mid-November, they harvest 250 to 300 live Christmas trees for sale at the farm and at lots in Silver City and Deming. About 20 percent of each planting is lost to weather, weeds or gophers; the surviving trees not deemed attractive enough for Christmas will be sold for landscaping.

Mike's son Tanner, age 12, zooms up on a motorbike he bought with money earned planting Christmas trees, which is what he's been doing this morning up until now. His sister Kaysie had been helping, he volunteers, "but she had a hair appointment."

In the boy's wake, the family dog, Trapper, a shaggy tan mop on four legs, barks a half-hearted greeting before slumping down in the shade for a nap. A cat, unnamed, flees around the side of the house where Mike Strain is talking on a cell phone.

Brother Walt starts the story while Mike finishes his conversation. "We both grew up in Lordsburg," he says, squinting into the low-hanging sun despite the shade from his red ballcap. "Mike's lived here since the '80s. When he bought this place there wasn't anything here at all. He planted the pecans about 1989, I think, and we built the house–well, it was finished in '92. Mike started with the Christmas trees about seven or eight years ago, and I became his partner six years ago."

Both brothers have full-time jobs around which they must work tree-farming. Walt, who lives in Silver City, stays here during the week and works at the nearby port of entry for the agriculture department. Mike is a lineman for the Duncan Valley Electric Cooperative.

"I don't really know how I got started with the Christmas trees," Mike says, ambling over to join his brother. Both men have moustaches and wear jeans, with heavy work gloves poking out of the back pocket of Walt's; Mike sports a tan ballcap. "It just seemed like a fun hobby, I guess. I like to be outside and I like dealing with people."

The Strains are a bit unusual in their choice of hobby/business. Despite its forests, New Mexico is hardly a hotbed for Christmas trees. The state has no members in the National Christmas Tree Association, a trade group for growers of what it calls "real" (as opposed to "fake") trees. New Mexico ranked 46th among the states in number of Christmas trees harvested in the most recent, 2002 US Department of Agriculture (USDA) census, with just 2,935 trees. It stood a bit higher, 21st, in acreage devoted to Christmas trees, at 3,632 acres (yes, that's more than an acre per tree–ask the USDA), but 44th in number of Christmas-tree farms, with only 22.

Nonetheless, New Mexico did produce the National Christmas Tree last year. The 13,000-pound spruce was cut from the Santa Fe National Forest and trucked to Washington, DC, after a farewell tour of 16 New Mexico communities.

Nationwide, as of the USDA's 2002 count, 21,904 farms produced conifers for the US Christmas-tree market; about 36 percent grew live trees, like the Strains, with the rest producing cut trees. A total of 446,996 acres were dedicated to growing Christmas trees, with the largest five percent of the nation's farms–those with 100 acres or more–selling 61 percent of all trees. Oregon is overwhelmingly the US' largest source of Christmas trees, with more than twice as many harvested as second-place North Carolina. Overall, the Christmas-tree industry employs more than 100,000 people full- or part-time.

Each acre planted with Christmas trees, according to the National Christmas Tree Association, produces the daily oxygen requirements of 18 people.

The association says it can take as long as 15 years to grow a tree of average retail height, six to seven feet. The average growing time from planting to presents under the tree is seven years. In the warm, sunny climate of the Gila River valley of southwest New Mexico, the Strains can get their fast-growing Afghan pines to market in three or four years, as the trees reach five to nine feet high.

Even so, it's a business that requires patience. "It's kind of a long, drawn-out process," Mike allows. "Even if we quit right now, we'd still be digging trees three to four years from now."

The Christmas-tree industry traces its roots, so to speak, halfway around the world from Strain's Tree Farm and several centuries before there even was a Christmas. What we would now call pagans long associated conifer trees, with their ability to remain green even in the dead of winter, with life and rebirth. Roman mosaics in North Africa depict the god of wine and male fertility, Bacchus (Dionysus to the Greeks), carrying an evergreen tree. The Romans decorated trees with shiny bits of metal–a forerunner of tinsel–and a dozen candles, not unlike our holiday lights and equally hazardous, as part of their celebration of Saturnalia, a winter festival that began on Dec. 17 and lasted until after the solstice. Some experts associate the timing of Saturnalia with our celebration of Christmas on Dec. 25; in AD 274, Roman Emperor Aurelian chose the end of Saturnalia for a new pagan "Birth of the Unconquered Sun" celebration, Dec. 25, and one theory goes that Christians settled on the same date for competitiv
e reasons.

In northern Europe, early Germanic people lit candles on evergreen branches in honor of the chief of their gods, Woden (or Odin). Vikings also associated the evergreen with another of their gods, Balder, who was killed by a spear or arrow of mistletoe, another symbol of Christmas that predates Christianity (along with holly, the wassail bowl and the Yule log).

The connection of evergreens with Christmas has many traditional though not necessarily historically accurate explanations. One version credits Saint Boniface (ca. 675-755), who was said to have cut down an oak–sacred to many pagans–in the presence of some newly baptized Christians. The oak miraculously split into four pieces to reveal an evergreen growing within, symbolizing Christianity replacing the old pagan ways. A similar tradition says the originator was a monk from Devonshire, England, about the same time, who went to Germany. Spreading the gospel in the province of Thuringia–later an important center of Christmas-decoration manufacture–the monk used the triangular shape of the fir tree to explain the Holy Trinity. Christmas trees soon spread through Central Europe, where by the 12th century they were commonly hung upside-down–presumably undecorated–from the ceiling. (This tradition would be revisited by modern retailers, who introduced upside-down trees not for religious reasons but because customers can cram more presents underneath an inverted tree.)

Another version says it was Protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) who introduced the Christmas-tree tradition: Luther was supposedly so struck by the beauty of a forest scene that he cut down a fir tree, took it home and decorated it with candles. Or perhaps it was that he wanted to capture the beauty of the stars for his children, so he set candles in a tree. This doesn't sound like the curmudgeonly, constipated Luther, however, and the earliest recorded decorated Christmas tree in Luther's Germany was not until nearly 60 years after his death.

Several sources credit Riga, Latvia, with displaying the first decorated Christmas tree, in 1510. But it was in Germany, with or without Luther's help, that Christmas trees really caught on. Initially they were called "Paradise Trees," as they were used to celebrate the Dec. 24 Feast of Adam and Eve. A visitor to Strasbourg in 1601 wrote of a tree decorated with "wafers and golden sugar-twists and paper flowers of all colors." About 1610, the Germans invented tinsel, cut from wafer-thin strips of silver, to decorate their trees. Initially, however, Christmas trees were viewed as a purely Protestant notion, and the Catholic majority along the lower Rhine was slow to adopt them until Prussians brought the tradition south after the Congress of Vienna in 1816. In 1824, German composer Ernst Anschütz gave the Christmas tree its carol with "O Tannenbaum," the melody for which was later appropriated by four US states–Iowa, Maryland, Michigan and New Jersey–for their state songs.

By the early 19th century, Christmas trees had become popular with European nobility, who spread the fad to courts in Austria and as far as Russia. The duchess of Orleans introduced Christmas trees to France in 1840.

Although Christmas trees had come to Britain with that country's German-born Georgian royalty–some credit King George III's Queen Charlotte–they didn't spread much beyond the royal family until the late 1840s. As with so much of 19th century culture, we have Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to thank for popularizing the Christmas tree. Even as a princess, Victoria had been enamored of the brightly lit holiday trees, writing in her dairy in 1832, "After dinner. . . we then went into the drawing-room near the dining-room. . . . There were two large round tables on which were placed two trees hung with lights and sugar ornaments, all the presents being placed round the trees." Her husband, Prince Albert, brought a similar enthusiasm for Christmas trees to the palace, and began donating trees to army barracks and schools. In 1847, Albert recalled happy holiday times around the tree with his brother Ernest, a tradition he wanted to pass on to his own family: "I must now seek in the children an echo of what Ernest and I were in the old time, of what we felt and thought; and their delight in the Christmas-trees is not less than ours used to be." That royal delight in Christmas trees was famously captured in a woodcut published in the Illustrated London News. The holiday scene, later republished in the United States, depicted Victoria, Albert and their children around a glowing Christmas tree–a setting that commoners everywhere were soon emulating.

Christmas trees had already arrived in America with Hessian troops and German settlers, although many Americans still held to the Puritans' view that decorating for Christmas was a "pagan mockery" of the holiday. Windsor Locks, Conn., claims that an imprisoned Hessian there erected the first tree on this side of the Atlantic in 1777. Another account says Christmas trees became popular after US soldiers stationed at Fort Dearborn in what's now Chicago decorated their barracks with evergreens in 1804. Easton, Penn., boosters counter that the town's German settlers put up "The First Christmas Tree in America" in 1816. Cattle barons from England, longing for a bit of home during the holidays, brought the tree tradition to Texas, from which it may have migrated throughout the Southwest.

President Franklin Pierce made America's adoption of the Christmas tree official in 1856, with the first White House Christmas tree. By the 1880s, stores such as FW Woolworth were selling glass Christmas-tree ornaments imported from Lauscha, Thuringia. Electric Christmas lights were patented in 1882, and metal hooks for hanging ornaments in 1892. The first National Christmas Tree was lit on the White House lawn by President Calvin Coolidge in 1923.

Today, as many as 35 million natural Christmas trees are sold annually in the US. The best-selling varieties are balsam fir, Douglas fir, Fraser fir, noble fir, Scotch pine, Virginia pine and white pine.

Almost every one of those 35 million Christmas trees starts the same way the Strain brothers' Afghan pines do, as a wispy seedling no more than six inches tall. Palettes of such seedlings, 98 to a container, ordered from a nursery in Las Cruces, sit in a trailer behind an ATV at the edge of the Strains' field, awaiting their turn.

"The first year that you plant them, they don't do much," Walt Strain warns. "It takes awhile for their roots to be established."

Mike Strain demonstrates the proper planting technique, picking up what looks like a rusty pogo stick with a pointed end and one missing foot bar. Positioning his foot on the lone rung, he plunges the pointed end into the roughly cultivated dirt. It digs a hole perfectly shaped for a pine seedling.

"It takes half a day to plant about 500 of them," he says, voice rising to be heard above the squawking of recently arrived sandhill cranes. "After about an hour or so of planting, though, it gets pretty old. You could plant 1,000 in a day, but 500 is about the limit of a kid's attention span."

Mike says his children enjoy planting seedlings–at least up to a point. "They like being outside, and it's a good way for them to earn money," he goes on. "In a rural area there are no jobs for kids except farm work."

"Plus they learn a good skill," Walt puts in. "They're already good with their hands, from playing videogames so much."

The seedlings are all Afghan pines, also known as Eldarica or Elderica pines, Mondel pines or Lone Star Christmas trees, from their popularity in Texas. According to the Texas A&M Cooperative Extension Service, Pinus eldarica "was first observed some 2,500 years ago in the desert regions of the Middle East. This desert-loving conifer developed its hardiness through an unusual history in a desolate corner of southern Russia near the Caspian Sea. Its tough nature is a legacy molded by relentless heat and drought. About 500 BC, Persian nobility used the Eldarica pine to create forested gardens where few other plants could even survive. It was so prized that commoners were forbidden ownership of the tree"–giving rise to yet another popular name, "The Tree of Royalty." It was first introduced to the American Southwest in 1961, when the USDA distributed five pounds of seed from Afghanistan to several universities to research the plant's adaptability. For Texans, the extension service notes, the tree's gre
atest drawback is that it thrives on only about 20 inches of rainfall annually–so the "Lone Star Christmas Tree" never needs watering there. When Texans do water the pine, they kill it–as countless gardeners learned the hard way after an unqualified endorsement extension agents now call "embarrassing."

Overwatering is seldom a problem in Southwest New Mexico, though the Gila River has flooded the fields of the Strains' neighbors in recent rainy years. "We've got a good climate for it in this area," Walt says. "It gets hotter during the day, but drops down almost as cool as Silver at night. The elevation is good, too. These trees like 4,000 to 6,000 feet best, no higher than 7,000 feet." The only other pine that will thrive here is the Aleppo pine, which he says is more of a landscape tree.

The Afghan pine resembles a Scotch pine, according to Texas A&M. With full, symmetrical branches and needles four to five inches long, it grows in a natural Christmas tree shape without pruning.

Growing cut trees typically requires laborious shearing to keep them sufficiently conical in shape. While the Strains do trim the tops of their trees to make them bushier, they don't shear them at all. "When you shear a live tree, it stunts the growth," Walt explains. "The tree takes a long time to come back from it."

Skipping shearing doesn't mean, however, that the Strains can just sit back and watch their trees grow. "Weeds are a constant," Walt adds. "They're the biggest labor problem." He bends to harvest the seed pod of a ground cherry, opening it with his thumb to reveal zillions of potential 2007 summer weeds. Once the summer's crop of weeds has just about finished, well, winter brings its own varieties.

If it's not weeds, it's vermin. They don't have too much trouble with rabbits or javelina as some growers do, Mike says, but gophers can be tree-killers. "You might not even see anything but a pile of dirt that looks like it's been rototilled."

"The top will stay green but the roots have all been eaten away," Walt says. "You can pull the tree right out of the ground."

Then there's the chore of watering. The Strains have rights to "ditch water" flowing in cement channels alongside the farm, but that's not always enough. Mike says, "You can't just go get water any time you want. In the summer you can get water maybe four or five hours at a time. So we supplement with that irrigation pump over there, which draws on a 70-foot-deep well. This close to the river, you hit water at about 30 feet deep."

They rotate planting, using acreage for pasture when it's not growing Christmas trees. "It's easier to water the whole field," Mike says. "The electricity costs so much to pump, you might as well run as much as you can."

Finally, there's harvest time, which comes hard on the heels of the fall seedling planting. Last year the Strains invested in a big yellow Case "spader," which sits at the edge of the field awaiting action.

"Before it was all by hand," Walt says. "The spader has really made a difference. It digs down all the way around about 18 inches. When you're digging by hand, you have to dig a bigger hole to make sure you get the whole root."

Mike adds, "The spader puts less stress on the tree. It holds real tight on the rootball. You just have to trim it to fit the bucket."

With live trees, you have to harvest within just a few years, before the tree and rootball get too big and too heavy. A friend of Mike's with a farm farther down Hwy. 70 decided to get into the tree business at about the same time, but never quite got around to harvesting. Now those trees are 20 feet tall, forming a thick forest behind the farm. As you drive toward Duncan, the wall of green suddenly materializes around a bend in the road, as though you've taken a wrong turn and arrived in Bavaria.

Although today 98 percent of the evergreens used as Christmas trees in American homes come from farms, not so long ago it was common holiday tradition to drive out into the forest to cut your own tree. In 19th century Germany, indeed, the craze for Christmas trees–cut to home size by lopping the tops off larger trees and leaving the base maimed, perhaps fatally–grew so great that laws were passed restricting the number of trees that could be taken from the dwindling forests.

"Oh, sure," Walt Strain says, "when we were kids growing up we'd make a picnic and go cut a pinon tree. It would make a good family outing." A wistful smile crinkles his moustache, and he adds, "It's a different time now."

Retired US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who also grew up near Lordsburg, recalled her family's holiday tradition in her memoir, Lazy B: "We always drove to the mountains outside Silver City, New Mexico, to select and cut down a pinon pine for our Christmas tree. We would take a picnic and drive north of Lordsburg to the national forest. We drove first to Tyrone, an old copper-mining town since closed down. Then we would drive to the old house in the woods once used by President Theodore Roosevelt for a hunting trip. Finally, we would eat our picnic lunch. Afterward, we would find a tree we thought would be the right size for the living room. As with all families, we often argued among ourselves about which tree was the best. The pinon pine is the most fragrant of all the conifers. The fragrance permeated the house when we put it up."

In those days, too, trees were traditionally not brought in and decorated until Christmas Eve, and might stand only until New Year's or Twelfth Night, Jan. 6. O'Connor remembered that her father "would not allow us to put up the Christmas tree or decorate it until Christmas Eve. We spent much of that day installing it and covering it with lights, ornaments and tinsel. We always went outside to check the stars before settling in for the night. Milk and cookies were always left by the fireplace for Santa."

Already, though, Christmas-tree traditions had begun to change. As early as 1851, New York City entrepreneur Mark Carr had introduced the concept of the retail Christmas-tree lot. In the 21st century, we've even figured out how to eliminate the trip to the tree lot, much less the forest: Some 175,000 "real" trees each year are now sold through catalogs or Web sites.

Trees kept getting bigger and showier, from Rockefeller Center in Manhattan to what was for most of the 1970s and 1980s the world's largest Christmas tree–erected, of all places, at the Florida headquarters of The National Enquirer.

By the time of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" in 1965, Christmas trees had come about as far as they could from the pinons Sandra Day O'Connor and her family cut by hand in the forest near Silver City. When Charlie Brown goes off to pick the scraggliest, most pathetic little tree on the lot–entering the phrase "Charlie Brown Christmas tree" into the language as synonymous with the runt of the litter–his friend Linus marvels, "Gee. Do they still make wooden Christmas trees?"

They do at Strain's Tree Farm. And these trees last long after Christmas, if you treat them right. "After Christmas you have something in your yard to look at," says Mike. "You're not just throwing away money."

Walt adds, "It gives people another option if they want to help save the environment."

When you get your live tree home, the Strains advise putting it on a sheet of plastic or a dropcloth, or setting the pot into a catchpan. No need to struggle with a stand. If the tree doesn't look quite straight, you can simply steady the pot with one foot and tug on the tree to adjust its positioning in the dirt.

"Water the tree by putting ice cubes on the dirt," Walt suggests. "They'll melt and slowly drip in and soak the soil, and you won't risk spilling any water." He adds, "It's better not to put the tree too close to a fireplace or heater vent."

Although Mike argues that live trees present less of a fire hazard than cut trees, the National Christmas Tree Association says that's not a big worry in any case: "Fewer than one-one-thousandth of a percent (0.001 percent) of all Real Christmas Trees used each year are involved in a fire. That's not a fire hazard! With proper care, Real Christmas Trees can maintain their freshness and moisture content throughout the holiday season."

After the holidays, don't forget to plant your live Christmas tree; too much time in the house will dry it out. But you don't want to rush the tree right outside into freezing temperatures, either. "That puts a big shock on the tree," Mike warns. "So put it in the garage or someplace warmer for awhile first. Then try to plant it within a month.

"The roots continue to grow during the winter," he goes on. "If you pull it out of the pot, you'll see these white, fibrous roots that have started already."

To plant your tree, dig a hole twice the size of the pot it came in. Mix compost with the native soil from the hole. (Afghan pines seem to like rockier soil, Mike notes.) Mulch generously to protect the tree. Water and then let the ground dry, which lets the soil absorb oxygen, before watering again; don't keep it soaked all the time.

If you don't have a place to plant a live tree, Walt adds, you can donate your tree after the holidays to a local school, hospital, cemetery or park.

After a year or so to get acclimated, the fast-growing Afghan pines will grow two to four feet a year. They'll slow down once they reach eight or nine feet.

"As long as the needles are green, the pine is healthy," Walt says. "But they don't come back once they turn brown."

In "A Charlie Brown Christmas," Lucy has another color scheme in mind for Christmas. She advises, "Get the biggest aluminum tree you can find, Charlie Brown, maybe painted pink."

Artificial trees–what the National Christmas Tree Association dismissively dubs "fake trees"–were first made out of feathers. In 19th century Germany, where forests of real trees were being denuded each Christmas, goose feathers were dyed green (sorry, Lucy) and wound onto sticks, then assembled into a tree shape. The first such artificial trees were introduced to America in the 1913 Sears, Roebuck catalog.

The Addis Brush Co. came out with America's first artificial brush trees, using the same machinery employed to make toilet brushes–a fact the National Christmas Tree Association, not surprisingly, crows about: "Regardless of how far the technology has come, it's still interesting to know the first fake Christmas trees were really just big green toilet bowl brushes." Manufacturers initially used animal hair, such as pig bristles, then switched to plastic. The "real tree" association notes, "The plastic material, typically PVC, can be a potential source of hazardous lead. . . . The potential for lead poisoning is great enough that fake trees made in China are required by California Prop 65 to have a warning label."

The metallic trees endorsed by Peanuts' Lucy came out in the 1950s. Initially made of aluminum-coated paper, they were, ironically, a fire hazard. For safety, aluminum trees were typically illuminated by spotlights on the floor–often shining through a rotating color wheel–rather than adorned with lights that might set them ablaze. Newer aluminum trees have fixed this safety problem.

Today, from 75 to 85 percent of all artificial trees sold in the US are imported from China. According to the Washington Post, the bestselling artificial tree made by Shenzhen Cosmotree Industrial Ltd., the "Canadian pine," costs about $10.80 to manufacture in its factory in southern China. Three-quarters of that expense goes to materials; the company's 300 workers each earn about $125 a month. Cosmotree sells the trees to a foreign-trading firm for about $12. By the time the "Canadian pine" reaches US store shelves, it will be priced at roughly $120.

While it takes several Christmases to amortize the investment in an artificial tree versus a real tree, there's little cost difference between live and cut trees. Larger cut trees may be somewhat cheaper than their living peers, because of the cost of transporting heavy rootballs; cut trees can also be stacked more efficiently on semi trailers.

Strain's live trees sell for about $20 to $40 for two-year-old trees, $50 to $75 for taller, three-year-old trees. "You're paying for another year of care, water and fertilizer," Mike explains. "Plus the price of the container doubles."

The brothers truck trees for sale to the lot at the corner of Swan and Hwy. 180 in Silver City and to the former Food Basket parking lot in Deming. It's a long drive from a town of any size to the Strain farm in Virden, but some families make the trek anyway, creating their own Christmas traditions.

"They come out with their kids and we give them a ribbon to write their name on, then tie around the tree they want," Walt says. "They'll spend a couple of hours, pick a handful of pecans and walk around."

He shakes his head. "Everybody's taste in trees is different. We had a couple come out and spend hours looking for just the right tree, walking up and down. The tree they finally settled on–well, let's just say it wasn't my idea of a good-looking Christmas tree."

It all depends on your point of view. As Linus says at last of Charlie Brown's scraggly tree, which bends under the weight of a single ornament, "I never thought it was such a bad little tree. It's not bad at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love."

Mike Strain and his family, of course, have the pick of the lot, with several thousand Christmas trees right in their own backyard. But he says, "Some years it's just potluck. My wife will come out and pick one sometimes. Other times she'll say to just bring one in."

A bigger problem he faces after the holidays is where to put the family tree. Walt says with a grin, "Mike has kinda run out of room to plant trees. Sometimes he gives 'em to a neighbor."

Nodding, Mike agrees. "About the last thing I want to do is plant another Christmas tree."

Strain's Tree Farm is located at 285 Hwy. 92, Virden, 358-2109; pickup and delivery are available. For schedules of temporary locations in Silver City, call Walt Strain at 590-0519; for Deming, call Mike at 469-3897.

David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.

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