Down on the Christmas Tree Farm

Nighttime temperatures dipping into the 50s. Lights wrapped around the trunks of palm trees. The smell of fireplaces instead of barbecues.

The holidays have arrived in Southern California.

The mild weather we treasure the other 11 1/2 months of the year does seem to shortchange us on holiday spirit. Only the mountain-dwellers can build snowmen. Our sweaters are cotton instead of wool.

But take heart, holiday lovers: You can cut down a tree here just the same as in Vermont.

OK, OK, the selection isn’t quite the same. You can’t trek into the woods and find a Norway spruce similar to the ones painted on Christmas cards. Douglas and noble firs, too, prefer the bracing Northwest. If you want to cut down your own tree in Southern California, you’re pretty much stuck with the Monterey pine, a tree with shiny green needles that are 2- to 3-inches long.

Monterey pines are the primary stock of the roughly two dozen Christmas tree farms in the region, most of which open Friday for some seasonal sawing. Some started taking tree reservations last weekend. Seem too early? Growers say a fresh-cut tree, kept in water, can easily last six weeks.

Tradition, schmadition. That’s really a value, said tree farmer Marilyn Cameron. “So you pay $30 for a [fresh-cut] Christmas tree and that can last the whole month. You buy a flower arrangement for $30-$35, and it’s gone in a week or so.”

A Christmas tree you cut down yourself can cost $4 to $9 per foot, sometimes less, depending on the farm and the quality of the tree. By comparison, retailers like Home Depot or K-mart buy fir trees by the field full from Oregon and Washington, then resell them for $18 to $37. Pre-cut prices tend to be higher at corner lots because they sell only high-grade trees.

Cameron and her husband, Donald, have owned the Christmas Ranch tree farms in Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley for 25 years and selL around 2,000 trees each December. Years of paring 10-foot trees down to 8-foot trees make her say: “Trees always look smaller in the field than they really are.”

She remembers a man who strolled in, announcing that he’d already picked out the tree he wanted. When he drove down the hill with it strapped to his car roof, she couldn’t even make out his “mini-Honda” under the tree’s broad branches. Cameron’s husband wound up delivering the tree in a pickup.

Charles Peltzer, the patriarch of the eight Peltzer Pines farms in Orange County, suggests that buyers trying to guesstimate if a tree will fit in their home figure that an average man can reach about 8 feet into the air--about the same height as ceilings in most older homes. Women can reach about 7 feet.

Debbie Pasquale prefers a 10- to 12-foot tree for her Brea home, and for the last seven years she’s gone to a tree farm to pick one out the day before Thanksgiving.

“It adds to the whole Christmas festivities,” she said. “Being here in California--I’m from back East--I don’t typically have what I’m used to. Cutting down your own really adds to the season. . . . Looking through the mass numbers of trees, and the smell!. I think that after you’ve done it once, the quality of the tree is so much better, even though it costs more, it’s well worth it.”

Over the last 30 years, Dick Crossman of Anaheim Hills has downsized to a 5- or 6-foot tree. He keeps his eye out for the perfectly shaped tree, which he never has trouble finding at a local tree farm. Now 70, he tries to get some help sawing, but he can do it himself.

“They’re moist, and you just get a big-tooth saw and go get it,” he said. “When you cut them down, they tell you to cut another half inch off the trunk right before you put it in water. That way they stay nice, and the fire hazard is a lot less, I think. You don’t get a dry tree hanging around.”

Peltzer, a former chicken and citrus farmer, remembers why he switched to raising pines in the early 1960s. “One day, the day after Thanksgiving, I watched 14 people stand in line [at an Orange County tree farm] with a $10 bill in their hands, and I thought, I’ve never seen people stand in line like that except at Knott’s Berry Farm’s chicken house.”

The population of Orange County has grown and changed, Peltzer said, and sales go up and down with the economy. But real trees are holding their own against the artificial variety, and may even be winning some converts in this era of Martha Stewart and old-fashioned authenticity.

“We have one very precious commodity to offer--we sell freshness,” Peltzer said. “These trees are growing right here in Orange County. A buyer can walk right up and touch and feel the tree that they’re going to buy this year.” Trees that grow in Southern California are never dormant, though, so it’s very important to keep locally cut trees in water.

If you’re worried about dryness or think it’s too soon to start decorating, Peltzer and many other lots will let you buy now and cut later. Actually you can buy now, and they will cut later. Peltzer prefers to have their staff do the sawing.

“We find too many people who like to saw their fingers. It does not make for a happy experience,” Peltzer said. “They can set up a video. Our cutter will cut the tree and they’ll yell, ‘Timber!,’ when it falls to the ground.”

That might be just about right for some of the tree-cutting newbies Cameron has seen arrive at her lots in Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley.

“We have people who come after church on Sunday and they’re all dressed up, including high heels,” Cameron said. She offers them plastic bags to tie over their shoes--which they decline. Then, after tromping through the muddy earth, they accept that plastic bag--to carry their nearly ruined shoes in.

Farmers advise wearing clothes you don’t mind getting dirty and gardening gloves. Farms usually provide saws and twine, and workers will wrap trees for transporting and help tie them onto a car. Cameron’s farm has a shaker--a mechanical device that vibrates a cut tree for a few minutes, forcing the dead needles to fall out.

It is, Cameron says, touching to be a part of a family’s holiday season. When she watches a parent and child tug a tree home on a little red wagon, it warms her heart. But it takes a lot of planting, watering and pruning to get to that scene.

It’s a 12-month-a-year job, she said. “We just work more in December.”

That job is getting harder and harder, as costs rise and belt-tightening consumers don’t buy a Christmas tree at all.

Mike Wade of the California Christmas Tree Assn. said the state had 700 tree farms a decade ago, and now has less than half that. Economic natural selection killed off many--but Southern California Edison is making quick business of the remaining few.

Many farmers leased inexpensive land under power lines in Edison’s rights-of-way. Edison hopes to make more money by evicting the tree growers and using the land for rented storage spaces. Each year, as more land-rental contacts expire, there will be fewer and fewer tree farms. At least eight farms were closed last year in Los Angeles County.

Cameron’s farm in Thousand Oaks is safe because it’s in the city’s “beautification zone,” so Edison won’t be allowed to convert it to public storage. Peltzer farms three Edison-owned lots, and still talks in disbelief about the meeting where he first learned that he might lose access to the land.

“It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen,” he said. “And I’m a stockholder in Edison.”