O Tannenbaum, how stout and fat art thou

One of our recurring Christmas time themes is that we marvel at the differences of the trees people put up over here versus in the U.S.

This does not even include the decorations, which you'd kind of expect to differ. No, we are talking about the trees themselves.

Condensing a description of the prevaling trees here into two words, you get "short and round".

Far from the repeatedly trimmed, almost manicured, perfect American cone-shaped Christmas tree that is more of a real-life incarnation of the images from hundreds of illustrated Christmas tales than a tree that grows up in a forest.

While there are fewer big front lawns that achieve a festive look only with an accordingly sized tree, there appear to be a couple of other explanations for the choice of trees.

The most important one that comes to mind is the relative insignificance of Christmas tree farms around here. You won't find a Discovery Channel special about Christmas tree farms, where numerous Mexicans wander through interminable rows of trees, clippers in hand, ferreting out that one small branch that will spoil a tree's appearance three of four years down the line.

Outside of the big cities, where trees from professional tree farms and trees trucked in from Eastern Europe are found, most people get their trees from small local lots.

Many towns send their municipal workers into the woods to cut trees that are then sold at a local Christmas market or at the town street maintenance yard on one or two weekends before Christmas.
Other towns arrange a "cut your own tree" weekend as an event for the whole family.

Trees procured through these outlets almost never start their life as a Christmas tree. They are trees from timber stands that need to be thinned out every few years for the timber to grow well.

In these crowed conditions, you get slightly irregular growth - "irregular" compared to the free-standing lines of Christmas tree plantations, and you won't get twenty different species either.

But they are really, really cheap. Last year, we got a 9-foot fir tree at the town sale for all of 8 Euros. Stateside, they might not sell trees as prickly as that one but for a tree that size you'd need to add a zero to the price anyway.

We'll head to a "cut your own" event later this week.

I'll channel my fondness of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree into just watching the Peanuts Christmas Special on the web, I guess.