In America the Christmas tree had become a fixture long before its appearance in England. German emigrants to our shores had brought it over with them, just as in earlier times the Dutch settlers of New York had brought over Santa Klaus. But it flourished in German settlements alone for many years before it was adopted by their neighbors, the northern descendants of the English Puritans and Pilgrims, or the southern descendants of the English Cavaliers.
New York, as the great landing place for emigrants and also as a city whose Dutch beginnings had given it a leaning towards the Teutonic spirit, was the first spot in which the German Christmas tree made a new home for itself. Gradually but surely the custom spread to citizens of other than German birth. Fathers of families got into the habit every Christmas of going out into the forests surrounding New York to cut a young spruce or fir tree for the holiday times. Or if they were rich enough to employ men-servants, they sent out the footman or the butler for this purpose.
It is said that a woodsman named Mark Carr, who was born among the foothills of the Catskill Mountains in the early part of the nineteenth century, was the first to make a regular business of Christmas trees. He had heard or read of the holiday festivities in the great city of New York, where churches and private parlors were hung with holly and hemlock leaves, and a pine or a fir tree stood in the middle of the nursery, covered with presents for the children.
It occurred to him that the young fir trees growing on the mountain-sides all around his little country home might be made use of for these holiday purposes. He could run no great risks in making trial of the idea. All he could lose was the time it took him to chop the trees down and bring them into market and the cost of a few days’ living in New York.
In December, 1851, he put his plan into practice. Early in the month he and his boys loaded a couple of great sleds with young trees cut down from the neighboring forests, and having hitched a yoke of oxen to each sled drove them through the deep snow to the Hudson River at Catskill, whence the father started with them to the city.
One old-fashioned silver dollar secured the use of a strip of sidewalk on the corner of Greenwich and Vesey streets. Here the hopeful mountaineer arranged his forest novelties for Christmas buyers. Nor had he long to wait. Customers flocked to his corner. Starting with moderate prices he soon raised them, as tree after tree left his hands, to sums that he would have deemed fabulous when he first dreamed of the experiment.
Next year he returned to the same place with a much larger stock, and “from that time to this,” says Hexamer, an old historian of New York, “business has continued to exist until now hundreds of thousands of trees are yearly sold from Mark Carr’s old corner.”
At the present day, Christmas tree choppers usually begin work about the first of November. Thus they avoid the early snow falls which are liable greatly to increase the difficulties of the business by melting and freezing again on the trees and making their branches too brittle.
Firs and pines growing in open spaces are preferred to those in dense woodlands because they are more stocky and symmetrical. As the trees are felled the woodsmen pile them up beside the forest roads, where they will keep fresh and green for weeks or if necessary for months.
The balsam fir is the favorite for Christmas trees in the middle and eastern states. Its leaves retain their color and elasticity longer than those of the black spruce, of which large numbers are however shipped into markets further south.