Nothing quite says Christmas like a fake Christmas tree. Well, actually the PC version, a fake Holiday tree puts a special merry twist to the idea, but I’m not going there. Yet. At first glance, the idea of a fake tree to celebrate the season sounds extremely tacky. Yet they’ve been around longer than I have. So by now it’s pretty much an ancient custom. Not that that makes it right. It just goes to show you that when it comes to taste, most people are lacking.

If you’re looking for an easy bar bet to win, challenge some drunk with the question of whether or not fake Christmas trees are an American invention. Most will assume they are, it seems a likely match. But the first fake trees were manufactured in Germany. Um, because Germany is a country known to not have the appropriate climate for growing evergreen trees. Oh, wait. Shit. Well, nothing the Germans have ever done has made sense to me either. Though I guess after having spent the entire month of October getting blitzed on beer, the idea of a fake Christmas tree sounded brilliant.

You’d also assume fake Christmas trees are a fairly recent invention. But it was way back in the 1800s that Germany introduced the idea to the world. The first fakes were made of green-dyed goose feathers and were sold in answer to the deforestation of the Fatherland during the holiday season. Custom at that time was for the tree hunter to cut off the top of a large Fir tree and leave the remainder of the tree to die. The fake trees offered the option of plucking a goose of its feathers and letting it die instead. The fake trees were all the rage and offered by department stores well into the beginning of the 1900s.

America got into the act in 1930 when a German immigrant who manufactured toilet brushes decided a mass of them, preferably unused, would make a dandy Christmas tree. Addis Brush Company began manufacturing the newest version of fake Christmas trees using animal hair bristles dyed green and the response was huge. A better mouse trap than the German version, the American fake Christmas tree could accept heavier ornamentation and was not quite as flammable. The toilet brush trees were so popular that large numbers were exported to Great Britain too.

In 1958, the first Aluminium Christmas tree was introduced in Chicago and America became the prominent manufacturer of fake trees for the next decade. Aluminum trees were the height of fashion (along with beehive hairdos) for the next ten years possibly thanks to the growing number of Americans who were discovering the joys of smoking pot. The shiny silver trees were set on a rotating base and lit by gel lights that changed the tree’s color. Hours of stupefying fun.

No slouches in the bad taste department, my parents made sure we had an aluminum tree to dazzle the neighbors with at the beginning of the craze, though I do give them credit for also putting up a real tree too. Though it was hidden away in the back family room. Aluminum trees were widely available into the 1970s though their popularity dwindled by the end of the 1960s. Some say it was the negative portrayal of aluminum Christmas trees in A Charlie Brown Christmas which aired for the first time in 1965. That a cartoon character would dictate America’s sense of taste and what was fashionable just seems so right.

American manufacturer’s lost their business to the Chinese with the next generation of fake Christmas trees which were made from PVC plastic and heralded for their realistic look. That’d be realistic looking to a Chinaman who’d never seen a real Christmas tree and who had no idea what Christmas was. The same country that brought you plastic reindeer, snowmen, and baby Jesuses marketed their fake Christmas trees as a way to avoid having to clean up fallen needles in your home. While ignoring the fact that in place of those pesky needles you made your Christmas bright by introducing a new lead contamination source into your holiday.

In 2005, $69 million worth of artificial trees from China entered the United States. A year earlier, a study by Dr. Richard Maas, researched the danger of lead poisoning from fake Christmas trees, noting: “We found that if we leave one of these trees standing for a week, and we wipe under the tree we’ll find large amounts of lead dust in many cases under the tree.”

In 2007, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer asked the Consumer Products Safety Commission to investigate lead levels in fake trees imported from China. A year later, an EPA report found that as the PVC in artificial Christmas trees aged it began to degrade and that of the 50 million artificial trees in the United States approximately 20 million were 9 or more years old, the point where dangerous lead contamination levels are reached. A holiday gift that just keeps giving, that means almost half of the fake Christmas trees in the U.S. will bring you an early death. Merry Christmas!

Of course the bigger complaint about fake Christmas trees is that they do not fill your home with the holiday scent of freshly cut evergreens. No problemo. You can also buy fake pine or fir scented sprays for your home which will bring the missing holiday aroma back into your Christmas. The scents aren’t bad at masking the smell of death from those who’ve enjoyed their fake Christmas trees for too many years too.

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