Christmas tree farms appeal to tradition

Sixty miles west of Chicago, Kim Kuipers and her husband have been selling real Christmas trees for 15 years, but when people decide on artificial ones, she gets it.

'They're beautiful, they're handy, they pop up like an umbrella with the lights already on them,” said Kuipers, owner of Kuipers Family Farm in Maple Park, Ill. 'So (real trees are) a tough sell.”

The Kuipers, along with other Christmas tree farmers around the country, hope a new national campaign will help sway customers toward the cutdown variety purchased in a lot, store or farm and bring stability to an industry that has had some rough patches.

The campaign's tagline? 'It's Christmas. Keep it real.”

'The reality is that there has been some loss in market share, if you will, to the artificial tree,” said Tim O'Connor, executive director of the Christmas Tree Promotion Board, a U.S. Department of Agriculture promotion and research program that manages the campaign. '(Farmers) want to fight that, They want to get in the battle and win customers back.”

The campaign is aimed largely at millennials, who get much of their news through social media, so most of what consumers see will be online.

There are Pinterest posts and a Facebook page, and materials for tree farms to download and share. Farms also received posters and stickers of the logo - a star-topped tree encircled by the tag line.

The campaign, by New York-based ad agency Concept Farm, launched Nov. 15 with a more than 2-minute video montage of scenes showing families picking out and decorating trees, cute dogs playing beneath the trees and couples kissing under the mistletoe, with real trees as the backdrop.

It touts the traditions built around buying a real tree. The campaign is funded by an assessment on producers and importers of fresh-cut Christmas trees.

Those that sell more than 500 trees a year pay 15 cents per tree sold. The promotion board collected $1.8 million last year, $1.25 million of which is going toward the 'Keep It Real” campaign, O'Connor said.

Locally, Dan Hoffman of Hoffman Tree Farm, 9409 C Ave. in Marion, said Christmas tree sales have stabilized in the last seven or eight years.

'We sell about the same number of trees every year,” Hoffman said. 'We have talked with a number of customers who go back and forth between a live tree and an artificial tree.

'Many younger couples come out with their children to cut down a tree because one or the other remembers doing it with their family when they were growing up.”