New White House Christmas Tree An NC Native

Christmas is two weeks away, bringing fun decorations and annual festivities. People decorate by putting up stockings, lights, and most importantly, trees. Every year the White House buys a tree and decorates it for Christmas. This year the White House picked a tree from Newland, North Carolina.

North Carolina is the second largest producer of Christmas trees in the U.S. Due to hurricane Helene ravaging the east coast, most North Carolina tree farms have fewer trees in their inventories. Cartner’s Tree Farm, the birthplace of this year’s White House tree, took on significant damage and lost 6,000 trees during the hurricane.

Tree farming can be a challenge because it takes about five years for seeds to grow into seedlings. Later the seedlings are planted in the fields and grow about a foot a year. It takes eight more years of growth to be ready for harvesting. Altogether taking around thirteen years for trees to grow. The process of keeping up with growing these trees is difficult since farmers must fertilize, trim, irrigate, and shape the trees, making the damage to these crops devastating. 

This year's White House tree was selected on October 28 and harvested November 20 from Cartner's Tree Farm, offering a sense of hope compared to the destruction in their area. Cartner’s, a family-owned business, has been growing trees since 1959. The Cartners started up the farm in the 1950s, growing a variety of crops, but progressively switched to primarily growing Fraser firs. 

To foster optimism, Cartner’s also planned a send-off for the tree which acted as a fundraiser to help tree farmers affected by the storm. On November 25, the 20-foot Fraser fir was brought back to the White House. The tree stands as a sign of hope through devastation.