Why your neighbors may have more Christmas trees than kids
Bridget McGregor Harris loves the soft glow of a Christmas tree.
“There’s this whimsical sense of magic with it that adds such a warm, happy feeling to my heart,” she told Straight Arrow News.
In recent years, she has opted for even more magic, pushing beyond her longstanding tradition of decorating one Christmas tree in her family’s Mississippi home. Now, she has three full-sized trees on display and another four mini-trees scattered among her children’s rooms and her entryway.
Sound strange? It isn’t. A growing number of Americans are displaying multiple trees.
“The average household has about 1.5 to 1.7 trees in the house,” said Chris Butler, CEO of National Tree Company, one of the nation’s largest artificial Christmas tree producers.
This new tradition has its — pardon the pun — roots in the proliferation of increasingly affordable artificial trees as real trees become ever harder to come by. And it’s being sped along by everything from social media trends to a shift in how much space Americans take up in their homes.
How many Christmas trees are in American homes?
As executive director of the National Christmas Tree Association, it is Rick Dungey’s job to be a vocal booster for the nation’s “real” Christmas tree industry. And he comes out swinging. Dungey does not consider what Americans typically refer to as artificial Christmas trees to count as trees. In an initial email to SAN, he instead characterized them as “fake, plastic, imported tree-shaped decorations.”
Dungey didn’t stop there.
“I would never buy a giant green toilet bowl brush and call it a Christmas tree,” he told SAN during an interview late last month. “But my opinion’s biased. I’ll admit that upfront.”
That opinion used to be a lot more common. But those days, it seems, are gone. In 1978, about a third of all families brought home a “real” Christmas tree (either shopped or chopped), a third had an artificial tree and another third skipped out on the tradition altogether.
These days, the math is a bit more complex.
“In general, there’s about 100 million households in the U.S., and of those households, about 85% of those celebrate Christmas with a tree — any tree,” said Butler, from the National Tree Company. “About 85% of those households celebrate with an artificial tree.”
This does not mean that only 15% of households with a tree have a real one on display.
“Artificial trees are incredibly popular, they’re increasing in popularity. That doesn’t mean that people aren’t buying real trees. They’re buying both,” said Jami Warner, executive director of the American Christmas Tree Association. Not to be confused with the National Christmas Tree Association, the ACTA is a “tree-agnostic” nonprofit organization that represents suppliers and retailers for both real and artificial Christmas trees. The ACTA believes “all Christmas trees are beautiful,” Warner told SAN.
“Christmas trees are exceptionally popular, and they’re gaining in popularity, period,” Warner said. “Real, and artificial.”
Still, it’s hard to ignore recent U.S. Department of Agriculture data that shows the number of real Christmas trees sold has been steadily declining for years. In 2012, the USDA reported that tree farms cut 17.3 million cultivated Christmas trees to sell. By 2022, that figure had shrunk by 16%, to 14.5 million.
According to Butler’s rough estimates, about 72.3 million artificial trees are on display across the U.S. — just about exactly five times the number of real trees sold in 2022, the most recent year for which USDA data is available.
Why are Americans buying more than one Christmas tree?
For McGregor Harris, displaying more than one Christmas tree is new. She and her family recently moved to a house with more space for going all-out at Christmas.
“I got these trees over the last two Christmases after we moved into our home,” she said. “We used to only have one tree to put up, but having a new home with nice, vaulted ceilings, I wanted a taller tree for the living room.”
She bought a 12-footer — the Grand Duchess Balsam fir, which earned viral fame on Tiktok a couple years ago — and centered it in front of a wall of windows in her living room, shifting her couch in the process to allow ample space.
“We loved it so much, I purchased the other trees,” she said.
That’s totally on trend. As Americans find more room to breathe in their homes, they also spot more room for trees. The size of the typical single-family home has grown significantly over the past few decades, even as the number of people living in each home has dropped.
According to an SAN analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the typical American home had about 623 square feet of living space available for each occupant in 1978. By 2024, that had grown to 958 feet — a 54% increase.
A lot of this growth is happening in American bedrooms, which have become a choice spot for trees. Amy Vance, a home organizer and owner of Eco Modern Concierge in Houston, Texas, has seen this firsthand as she and her team prep dozens of client homes for Christmas each year.
“In recent years, more people are putting trees in their kids’ rooms than they used to,” Vance told SAN. “That used to not be a big thing for us, and now that’s a big thing for every kid to have a different tree in their room.”
The reason is simple: “It makes the kids happy,” Vance said.
So happy that Christmas trees are teetering close to outnumbering kids here in America. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. total fertility rate — the number of children to whom the typical American woman gives birth over her lifetime — fell to 1.63 in 2023, a 19% drop from 30 years earlier.
Kid-room trees are often smaller than a home’s main tree, which usually measures up at about 7-and-a-half feet or so. Vance said that in her experience, “a 4- to 6-foot tree is the average for a kid’s room.” And this part of the Christmas magic is a direct result of the growing artificial tree market.
“There’s so many different shapes and sizes now, and any kind of species from the very, very realistic to the very, very fun and funky,” said Warner, from the ACTA. “There’s a tree out there for every taste, every budget, every size.”
Do people buy more artificial Christmas trees than real ones?
Social media is — as always, it seems — also at play. After spending much of her life as a one-tree die-hard, Pennsylvania resident Tara Chila told SAN that she scaled up to two trees about four years ago after stumbling on Christmas tree designer Sami Riccioli’s Instagram account.
Now, Chila has three trees in her home.
“I decorate the entryway one with white and silver ornaments, the big tree I decorate with lots of red- and white-striped things and the sentimental ornaments from the kids,” she said.
The tree in her basement is more “minimal, but the lights on the tree alone bring so much to the room,” she told SAN. She hasn’t added trees to her children’s rooms, she said — yet.
“One big driver,” said Pamela O’Brien, owner of Pamela Hope Designs in Houston, “is Instagram.”
“The influencers may be doing it because they want to do something super unusual that gets seen and noticed,” said O’Brien, who has been decorating Houston-area homes for the holidays for enough years to compile a wealth of longitudinal, institutional knowledge. “And then other people see that and say, ‘Oh, I really like that color. I’m going to go buy some ornaments like that.’ So then all of a sudden you add that idea to your tree. Or maybe you decide you like it so much you’ve got to do a little tree like that.”
That’s easier to do with artificial trees, said O’Brien, who remembers her parents buying two real trees in her youth, but cannot, for the life of her, figure out how they shuttled both home. An extra-large car? Multiple trips?
And even as artificial trees are being impacted by tariffs this year — adding about 30% to the cost, according to Warner — the fact that these trees last for several years keeps them in budget compared to real trees, which will cost an average of $80 to $100 this year.
Still, while Americans increasingly embrace artificial trees, we’re a long way away from tossing out the Tenenbaums altogether.
Even as her home glows with the twinkle of seven trees, McGregor Harris still feels nostalgic for the simpler memories of her youth.
“I miss the smell of a real tree sometimes,” she said.
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
