The tree was brown and sickly looking. “No one will want to buy a Christmas tree that ugly,” thought Eric Walther, owner of Strawberry Hill Christmas Farm.

 He decoratively wrapped a strand of red ribbon around the tree and tied it in a large bow. The tree looked better, but it still resembled the tree in A Charlie Brown Christmas. A few days later, Walther saw a young girl and her family standing in the field by the tree. The family said they would like to purchase it. Walther responded, flabbergasted, that better-looking trees were available, but the girl insisted on buying the dying tree. “All the other trees are beautiful,” she said. “Someone else will buy them. I don’t want this tree to be lonely, so I’m going to keep it company.”

 After 25 Christmases at Strawberry Hill, stories such as this one still bring a smile to Walther’s face. “I used to think I was selling Christmas trees,” he says, “but I’m really selling a memorable Christmas experience.”

The Process

Managing a Christmas tree farm is an intense, manual-labor job. The rows of perfectly shaped trees are the result of a year-long process that ends just before Thanksgiving, when the farm opens for business.

 After Christmas, Eric and his wife, Lynn, who helps run the farm, take a break from farming until the end of February, when the weather is warm enough to plant 1,500 new trees. Like many modern Christmas-tree farmers, the Walthers buy their trees from nurseries when the trees are two years old. The Walthers typically buy Scotch Pine trees because they have the best survival rate in Kansas’ fickle climate.

 Next, Eric digs holes for the young trees and replants them in his field. Because they live in the country, where water costs more than in the city, the Walthers do not water their trees. They simply spray them for diseases, mow the grass around them and let nature take its course.

 Christmas trees take about three years to establish a root system, and eight years to reach their average height of seven to eight feet. Because of hungry wildlife and drought, many trees don’t survive their first three years at Strawberry Hill, which is located a few miles outside Lawrence at 794 U.S. Highway 40.

 About eight years ago, Lawrence underwent a severe four-year long draught that killed 6,000 of the Walthers’ young trees. As a result, the Walthers have had to supplement their stock with Fraser Firs from a friend’s farm in Wisconsin this season.

 “Agriculture is a risk,” Lynn says nonchalantly.

 From the end of March until November, Eric, his wife Lynn and about 10 other employees trim and shape the mature Christmas trees, one by one, on the farm’s 20 acres of land. Although the branches on the bottom of the trees are naturally longer, the trees do not naturally grow into the shape most people think of when they imagine a Christmas tree. Almost a decade ago Eric noticed that a particular employee, an architecture student, did a better job shaping the trees than any of the other employees. From that point on, the Walthers have recruited from the University’s architecture department because, they say, those students have a better conception of what a cone — the shape of a Christmas tree — actually looks like.

 After the trees have been trimmed, its time to dye them. Because trees in Kansas and states farther north get less sunlight than those in Southern states, Christmas tree farmers have to coat them with a subtle green dye that helps to lock in the chlorophyll so the trees do not yellow as quickly.

 Finally, its time for the selling season, and then the process starts all over again.

Christmas comes but once a year

When shoppers enter the farm they are greeted by the sound of Christmas music playing on speakers and an offer to take a free hay ride down to the field. Shoppers can either cut down the tree themselves, or an employee such as Dan Perskchini, Overland Park senior, will do it for them, drive it back to the workshop and place it in the shaking machine. The trees are shaken before they are netted and sent home with customers to reduce the number of dead needles on the tree, Perskchini says.

 While shoppers are waiting for this process to be completed, they can enjoy free cookies and hot cider in the Strawberry Hill workshop, where Lynn uses the remnants of trees to make wreaths, center pieces and other decorative Christmas items and sells homemade goods. Customers also pay for their trees, which cost about $7.50 per foot, or about $52.50 for an averaged-sized, seven-foot tree, there.

 After all the Christmas customers have come and gone, it’s finally Eric and Lynn’s turn to select a Christmas tree of their own. “Someone once asked me, ‘What tree do you get?’ Lynn says. “What’s left over.”