According to the National Christmas Tree Association, people began to decorate Christmas Trees in 17th century Germany. The practice developed from props (evergreen boughs with apples) used in “miracle plays” that were performed at churches on December 24th. A century later in parts of Austria and Germany, evergreen tips were hung from ceilings and decorated with apples, gilded nuts, and red paper strips.

In 1848, the Illustrated London News published an article on the Christmas tree at Windsor Castle which featured an illustration of the Royal Family surrounding a decorated Christmas tree. This soon became the fashionable standard for Christmas celebrations in England and America.

Christmas trees have been sold commercially in the United States since about 1850. Until fairly recently, about the 1930’s and 1940’s, all Christmas trees came from the forest. The first Christmas tree retail lot in the United States was started in 1851 in New York by Mark Carr. In 1900, large stores started to erect big illuminated Christmas trees.

Christmas tree farming was once seen only as a viable alternative for low-quality farmland, but that perception has changed within the agriculture industry. For optimum yield and quality, land should be flat or gently rolling and relatively free of debris and undergrowth.

In 1901, a 25,000 tree Norway Spruce farm was sown near Trenton, New Jersey. The commercial market for Christmas trees had started fifty years earlier when a farmer from the Catskill Mountains brought trees into New York City to sell. Despite these pioneering efforts, most people still obtained wild-grown Christmas trees from forests. More trees were grown in plantations after World War II, and by the 1950s farmers were shearing and pruning trees to meet customer demands. The Christmas tree market burgeoned through the 1960s and 1970s. In the early 21st century, nearly 98 percent of all natural (non-artificial) Christmas trees sold worldwide were grown on tree farms.

In the area of Mount Rogers Virginia, in the early 1950’s, individuals sold wild collected trees from native stands of Fraser Fir. Trees were sometimes sold for as little as fifty cents each. Fraser Fir has excellent Christmas tree qualities and grows native only in a relatively small area of the highest elevations of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. They are known for retaining their needles far longer into the holiday season than most other tree varieties. In the early 1970’s the privately owned range of Fraser Fir in Virginia became part of the Mount Rogers National Recreational Area.