Three key things I didn’t know about artificial Xmas trees: Fluffing time, branch tip count, and storage.
I knew nothing about artificial Christmas trees. So I started my research where I usually do, on Amazon.
When I started, I assumed you pulled the tree out of the box much like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Reach in, give a tug, and out comes the tree, fully-formed. The branches must “sproing” into place, or something. And at the end of the season, you stuffed it back into the same box, the branches neatly folded back into rest position, and you were done.
Five minutes on Amazon, and I realized I had no clue how modern artificial Christmas trees actually worked. The twin keys to my ignorance were frequent mentions of “fluffing time” and “branch tip count” on Amazon. Use of these terms made choosing a tree kind of difficult, as I had no clue what either one of them was about.
Fluffing time: The big branches of the tree do fold up and down against at the trunk, but all of the little branches are just stiff wire, with plastic “pine needles” embedded. Turns out, all those little branches are packed flat against the main branch. You have to bend each individual branchlet into place, by hand, one at a time, in a process termed “fluffing” the tree.
Branch tips: And this is where the “branch tip” ratings come in. A six-foot artificial tree might have anywhere from 1000 to 2500 “branch tips”. Which more-or-less equates to that many little stiff pieces of wire that must be bent, by hand, into some approximation of a real tree. More branch tips (per unit of tree volume) leads to a fuller-looking fake tree. On Amazon, time and again, the manufacture would say something like “45 minute assembly time”, and the Amazon comments would say something along the line of two to three hours of “fluffing time”.
The upshot is that “fluffing” is the industry euphemism for spending hours of time bending little stiff wires covered in bristles, so that your myriad branch tips approximate the look of a real tree. The near-universal advice on Amazon was to wear gloves and take your time. In fact, many of the trees on Amazon come with a pair of gloves thrown in. Presumably because you’ll need them.
And the third key thing? Storage. Because, although nobody say this explicitly, fluffing appears to be a one-way street. I get the impression that nobody packs their tree down into anything like the original size. As a result, you need somewhere to store your fully-fluffed tree — possibly in pieces, possibly slightly compressed — for the off season.
The upshot is that a new artificial tree requires several hours of “fluffing time”, wherein you take 1000’s of branch tips and bend them into shape. After which you must store the tree in its fluffed condition.
Purpose and summary of this post
In our family, we’ve always gotten some type of real Christmas tree.
But this year I’m going artificial. I think.
As usual, before I buy a consumer durable, I do my homework. This post summarizes what I’ve learned so far. Starting from a point of complete ignorance about artificial Christmas trees.
Briefly:
- Artificial trees are overwhelmingly the U.S. norm, with roughly 85 percent of households with Christmas trees opting for an artificial tree.
- Families with little kids tend to favor real trees, and tend to transition to fake trees as the kids age and the parents retire.
- The main reason cited for buying an artificial tree is convenience, which I think dovetails with the use of artificial trees by age.
- Artificial trees last about a decade, on average. So the decision to go artificial kind of locks you into it for a while.
- Environmental concerns for real-versus-fake trees are more-or-less a wash,
- But the longer you keep the same fake tree, the better.
- For a newly-purchased fake tree, “fluffing” the tree — bending thousands of wire branch tips into position — seems like a major pain.
- Fluffing is a one-way street, so you need a place to store your fluffed tree in the off-season.
- Trees with embedded lights don’t last as long as plain, unlit trees.
- White trees tend to discolor over time, particularly if stored in non-climate-controlled areas.
- The more “branch tips” per unit of tree volume, the fuller your tree should look.
The upshot is that I’m looking for a plain, un-lit, un-decorated green tree. With a reasonable number of branch tips per unit of volume. (Which, of course, I have worked out a formula for.) And the first thing I’m going to do is scour the local thrift shops, because the thought of spending hours “fluffing” a tree is unappealing.
We’ll see where it goes from there.
Background: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia
My father, who shouldered most of the labor, once suggested buying an artificial tree. We called him out for the vulgar suggestion of convenience over tradition, and he never brought it up again. Aryn Baker, in Time Magazine, December 2022.
I can relate to the quote above. As the family member officially tasked with Getting The Tree, I’ve been lobbying for an artificial tree for years now. The stopper has always been my family’s refusal to consider an artificial tree.
In particular, my wife was clearly and firmly against buying a fake tree.
Or so I thought.
Our Christmas tree traditions have been sledding downhill for decades. Once upon a time, we’d make a big outing out of taking the kids to a cut-your-own-tree farm. That lost its charm as the kids got bigger, so we went with the trees offered by a local charity. We’d go to the lot, make a fuss over getting just the right tree, then overpay the local charity, all in the spirit of the season. After a few years of that, we got to buying our tree so late that my only option was to shanghai whichever child was available for a last-minute run to pick up a tree at the local big box hardware store.
So we were already at the point of real-Christmas-tree-as-industrial-commodity. Which it has been, all along, in reality. But buying one in the garden section of Home Depot just hammered that home.
Deck the Halls and scan the barcode? Not very Christmas-y.
But last year I hit rock bottom, with an exotic tree species, the brown pine. On a whim, I picked up a little live tree, figuring to plant it after Christmas. It had some species name on the label, but as it turns out, it was actually a member of the brown pine family. This was only revealed a few months after putting it outside.
And so, in the spirit of the holidays, I once again asked my wife if she still objected to artificial Christmas trees. And the answer was not merely that she had no strong objection, but that she’d never had any objection to artificial trees in the first place.
And just like that, I’m in the market for an artificial tree.
Environmental impact of artificial Xmas trees?
In a nutshell: It’s no big deal either way.
First, If I’m an environmental sinner for buying a fake tree, I’ll surely have a lot of company in hell. Households with real Christmas trees are a small minority. In 2021, about three-quarters of American households displayed a Christmas tree, and of these, 84 percent have an artificial tree (reference). That’s figure varies a bit from year to year, but is in the low 80 percents in all the surveys shown on the cite referenced above.
A different (yet seemingly credible) poll shows just 71% of surveyed adults (who were having a Christmas tree) planned on having an artificial tree (reference). That’s a huge discrepancy (versus 84 percent, above), for a simple yes/no question. The same article cites the association representing Christmas tree growers, which puts the number around 75 percent, but should be treated as a number from an advocacy organization.
So which estimate is more likely to be right, 71% artificial or 84% artificial?
Don’t be mislead by statistics about annual Christmas tree sales. Based on the survey cited above, the median life of an artificial tree is about ten years. Accordingly, each year’s sales of real trees top the sales of artificial trees. But that’s only because the typical artificial tree user buys a new tree just once a decade.
That said, annual sales data, coupled with a typical 10-year lifetime, suggest the 84-percent-artificial estimate is correct. In a typical year, about one-third of Christmas tree sales are artificial trees (reference). With an average 10-year lifespan, in the steady state, that (via simple math) implies that about 83% of Christmas tree used in any given year are artificial trees.
The upshot is that real Christmas trees are not exactly a relic of the past, but they long-ago lost the bulk of the market to artificial trees.
Further, and without citation as to source, my decision to switch to an artificial tree late in life is typical, as is my reason for doing so. As people age, and no longer have young children in the home, preferences shift toward an artificial tree. And the most-cited reason for going with an artificial tree is convenience. Both of which describe my situation. And so, my family’s long downhill slide toward fake-tree heresy is apparently normal. Young families with small kids more frequently opt for a real tree. Retirees, less so.
Despite artificial trees being the clear winner in the Christmas tree war, there seems to be a robust and highly-opinionated debate over the environmental impact of real versus artificial Christmas trees.
Which I find just shy of hilarious, given the context. Kind of like obsessing about the environmental impact of plastic straws, as you sit in your Hummer waiting your turn in the McDonald’s drive-through.
In any case, as I contemplate buying a bunch of gifts that my family doesn’t need, I find it hard to get exercised about the impact of the Christmas tree itself. Virtually every material Christmas gift will have been made overseas and shipped here in single-use packaging. Which I will then re-wrap using yet more single-use wrapping paper. Because it’s Christmas, and that’s how we do things here. In that context, the difference between a once-a-decade purchase eventually destined for the landfill (fake tree) and a yearly purchase of some custom-grown compost (real tree) is lost in rounding error. It’s just too small to matter in the grand scheme of the season.
Even more than that, the choice between real and artificial is more-or-less a wash, for the average purchaser, in terms of overall environmental impact. Depending on whom you listen to, for the typical user, if you keep your artificial tree for enough years, you’ll have about the same environmental impact as the equivalent string of real trees. The break-even point is five years’ use of an artificial tree (see this seemingly-competent .pdf life-cycle analysis). Some say ten. This one says 7 to 20. Pick a number. Some wing it and say never, based on what amounts to moral or emotional or other (e.g., fear) considerations. But of the serious life-cycle analyses of the issue, somewhere in that five-to-ten year span, your N-year use of a steel-and-plastic artificial tree will have about the same environmental impact as growing, shipping, and disposing of N real trees.
YMMV.
So, for once, I just don’t care enough about the environmental impact to bother to look into it. It’s just too small to matter, in this context.
Narrowing it down
My only environmental takeaway is that the longer the artificial tree lasts, the better. But this immediately gives me three guidelines as I start to sort out what’s available locally and on the internet.
Unlit. You can buy fake trees that are just fake trees, or you can buy trees that have Christmas tree lights already embedded in the fake tree. Data pretty clearly show that trees with embedded lights have a shorter lifetime than unlit trees. I’m not sure whether that’s literally due to lights breaking and burning out, or whether the persons attracted to the convenience of a pre-lit tree are more likely to dispose of a tree sooner. That said, the (sketchy) fake-tree longevity data argue for buying an un-lighted artificial tree. Plus, I already own lights. And putting the lights on the tree is part of the Christmas tradition.
Green. You can buy fake trees in a variety of colors, including ones that mimic snow on the tree. Heck, you can buy them with the ornaments already (permanently) attached. My take on it is that anything other than green is going to get old pretty fast. And that, literally, the white plastics on white trees tend to yellow over time, particularly if stored in areas that are not climate-controlled, such as an attic or garage.
Better quality. One huge drawback to buying a fake tree is that it’s a commitment. Once you buy one, you’re pretty much stuck with it for the next decade or so. You can’t in good conscience try it one year, decide that you’d rather have a real tree, and toss it in the trash.
Given that, even though I’m not quite sure how to judge this, I think that purposefully shopping the low end of the market might be a mistake. In theory, all these trees are made from steel wire and PVC plastic. So I’m not that worried about having a cheap tree fall apart. It’s more that if the tree doesn’t look really nice, I’m less likely to want to keep putting it up.
The upshot is that I want a better-quality, un-lit, green Christmas tree.
Step 1: Hitting Amazon as prep for hitting the thrift shops.
At first glance, it’s hard to make sense of the pricing of artificial Christmas trees on Amazon. The price per foot, for the same model of tree, rises steeply with the height of the tree. Below, increasing the height by 66% (from 4.5′ to 7.5′) increased the cost per foot by 180% (from $13/foot to $36/foot). By contrast, I think that real trees are priced more or less the same, per foot. You’d expect an 8-footer to cost about twice as much as a 4-footer, or zero percent change in the price per foot. So the pricing structure of these artificial trees seems grossly at odds with what I’m used to, for real trees.
But just a little analysis shows that this steep increase with tree height makes sense. For a given manufacturer and model of tree, pricing is pretty much a case of “you get what you pay for”. The reason that costs rise so steeply with tree height is that the total volume of the tree rises faster-than-linear with tree height. And the manufacturers more-or-less have to fill the volume of the tree with something.
To a close approximation, for this “family” of trees (same model, same manufacturer):
- The cost is about 7 cents per branch tip, more or less.
- The density of branch tips per cubic foot is roughly the same for all but the smallest tree.
- The actual height/width ratio falls as the height of the tree rises.
I think this, along with a look at a few similar trees, tells me roughly what I need to know as I go looking for a tree in my local thrift shops.
Mostly, there’s no free lunch. The pricing of these trees seems to be almost entirely a function of the volume of materials used. Count the branch tips, multiply by a few cents per branch tip, and that’ll be the price.
In addition, it appears that manufacturers of a given model of tree shoot for some more-or-less uniform density of branch tips per unit of tree volume. Turning that on its head, for a given desired density of branch tips per unit of volume, I should be able to select any size of tree, and still be able to meet that goal.
So, with Amazon as the baseline, I think I ought to be able to look at trees and tree prices, across thrift shops, and make some sort of informed judgment.
