Trees

Some forehanded people buy Christmas gifts in August, but the market for Christmas trees never opens until after Thanksgiving. Last week long flatcars laden with evergreens and snow began to roll into New York and Chicago, focal points of the Christmas tree business. In the four weeks before Dec. 25, at least 400 carloads will be sold in New York, 250 in Chicago. Hundreds of carloads will be sold off the sidings in other cities, bringing U. S. tree dealers a total business of perhaps $10,000,000. Of the profit there can be no certainty. A carload of Christmas trees the day after Christmas is worth less than nothing.

The short life of Christmas trees and their festal market has inspired produce dealers to describe this sideline to their business as "the greatest of crapshooting games." Greatest U. S. Christmas crap-shooter was a Manhattan jobber named George Blanck, who cornered the market in 1916. He was supposed to have made $100,000 that year. In Portland, Me. people still talk about old Edward K. Chapman, who was for years a towering figure in the Christmas tree trade, although he never gave a Christmas present in all his life. Bearded as snowily as Santa Claus and a lover of balsam firs, Dealer Chapman tramped into Maine's woods each winter to oversee the selection and cutting of fine trees even in his 80's. In those days Maine supplied about half the trees sold in the U. S. Eastern dealers now get their best trees from Nova Scotia. After Oldster Chapman's death five years ago the moth blight settled funereally on Maine's balsam forests, nearly ruined that State's Christmas tree production.

Far from the Kris Kringle type is Manhattan's No. 1 Christmas tree dealer, 45-year-old Fred Vahlsing. One of the biggest vegetable shippers in the U. S., owner of rich farms in Texas' lower Rio Grande Valley, sharp-eyed Dealer Vahlsing makes money on Bonita carrots, advertised by radio's homiest housewife, Martha Deane. Says he: "Martha Deane, she's my carrot. . . ." From his bleak warehouse office on Manhattan's Warren Street, Dealer Vahlsing sends a man up to Nova Scotia early in July to make contracts with landowners and woodcutters. In October Vahlsing's man rounds up about ten crews of four or five men each, starts them cutting the most symmetrical young firs they can find. The cut trees are piled in the forest, covered with leaves to keep them fresh.

Christmas Tree King in Chicago is a genial Greek named Gust Relias, who will sell this year about 50 carloads of trees. A produce dealer like Fred Vahlsing, his mainstay is tomatoes. If Gust Relias is lucky this year, as he usually is, he will clear $20,000 on Christmas trees before Dec. 25. At the Wabash Railroad concentration point at 27th Street & Ashland Avenue, he will appear daily to auction his trees by carload or by bundle to wholesale or retail buyers. His voice may be drowned out by that of his rival, Izzy Cloobeck, who can be heard three miles on a tranquil day, but Gust's trees are known to be topnotch.

Before Maine's blight five years ago most trees went to Chicago from the East. Now more than half of them go from Montana and Washington, with a sprinkling of what Chicago Christmas tree merchants call "garbage" from the cut-over land of Michigan and Wisconsin. As in the East, the favorite tree is the luxuriant and fragrant balsam fir, with spruce, still considered the only real Christmas tree in the South, a bad second. Exclusive with Gust Relias are colored Christmas trees, sprayed green or silver at his shipping point, Eureka, Mont.

Big jobbers like Vahlsing and Relias get from $1 to $2 a bundle for table trees, two or three feet high, which come in bundles of eight. Slightly larger trees, six or four to a bundle, bring up to $3. Tenor twelve-foot trees, "singles," are sold for about $2.50 each. Tallest trees are called "church trees" and bring as much as $1.25 a foot. These prices are usually doubled at retail.

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