Hunting the Wild (well, sort of) Christmas Tree

By Anthony Todd in Miscellaneous on Dec 11, 2008 8:30PM

The entrance to the farm. As you can see, it was a bleak and snowy day.

It\'s easy to fall in love with trees!

Trying to ascertain where, exactly, the trunk meets the ground.

Your intrepid author, taking his turn with the saw.

Success! For city folk, the sense of triumph is overwhelming.

The Tree-Shaking Machine - the whole experience is worth it, just to see this vaguely obscene show.

During our rustic childhood, cutting down our own Christmas tree was a normal part of the holiday routine. Rather than going to a tree lot, we would troop out to a tree farm that looked a lot like a tree lot – rows and rows of identical, pre-tagged and measured trees. You marked the one you wanted, it was cut and brought to your car, and you drove it home. Fun, but not quite the slogging-through-the-snow Paul Bunyan adventure we wanted.

Tammen Treeberry Farm in Wilmington takes Christmas tree hunting to a whole new level. Open since 1956, they grow about 160 acres of trees and have five species to choose from. Rather than a neat and tidy lawn covered with trees, this farm is a large rambling collection of trees for you to browse through. In fact, it’s so large you have to drive around it! They also have a U-Pick blueberry operation – hence the name.

When you drive through the gate, you are handed a saw and a map. There are roads cut throughout the property, and you can try to navigate to the tree you want – we mostly drove around and looked out the window. Once we found a spot that looked promising, we got out of the car and wandered until we found exactly the tree we wanted. Then, we crawled around on the ground hacking away at the trunk until, feeling like miniature lumberjacks, we shouted “Timber!” and the tree came down.

Next was the long trek back to the entrance. We recommend that you get some twine from the parking lot before you cut down your tree – otherwise you will have walk it all the way back in a driving snowstorm. Or, if you’re lucky, you can flag a ride from a passing pickup truck, as we did. Once you get back, you can have your tree shaken and baled. Tree shaking is necessary to get all the dead bits, vines and possible rodents out of the tree before it goes into your living room.

If you’ve never done it, cutting your own Christmas tree is an experience not to be missed. The price is an added benefit – rather than paying by the foot or the type of tree, every tree on the lot is $45, no matter how big or tall. Baling and shaking brought the total price to $52 – cheaper than we usually pay for a small, not-very-fresh tree at a lot.