CHRISTMAS TREE FACTS AND FIGURES!!

   Christmas time is right around that corner, so why not a graphic to celebrate the origins of the Christmas tree? This graphic, created by All in One Garden & Leisure, gives a rather unique look at the tree’s beginnings and its, for lack of better words,   a journey through time.

   One of the interesting stats presented by the graphic is the number of households who choose to put an artificial tree up versus a real tree taken right out of the forest (or jungle if you’re celebrating Christmas in South Africa). The pie charts in the graphic demonstrate that more people in the U.S. opt to go with a natural tree then their fellow tree buyers in the U.K. My gut reaction when I saw that stat was, “I wonder how many trees are actually grown the U.K.? Doesn’t seem like there is nearly as much land.” And sure enough, my question was answered right below that. As I suspected, there are more trees (many, many more trees actually) grown in the U.S. then there are grown in Great Britain. There are 20.8 million trees grown the U.S. and 4.4 million grown in the United Kingdom. With these kind of numbers, it does make sense that there would be a higher percentage of real Christmas trees bought in the U.S. The U.S. is more intent on destroying its forests than the U.K it would seem. The graphic notes that each acre of land dedicated to growing Christmas trees would provide the daily oxygen required for 18 people to live. Basically, the graphic does a good job of making you feel guilty about celebrating Christmas with a real tree.
   The most popular real tree brand by the way is a humdinger of a tree dubbed the Fraser Fir. The graphic showcases a little tree time line, noting that the first Christmas tree was used in Latvia in 1515 and that the explosion of Christmas trees in America began in 1901 with the under-hyped birth of the first Christmas tree farm in New Jersey. Today 98% of Christmas trees purchased around the world are grown on tree farms. Only 2% are cut in the wild. Of those that are cut in the wild, a tree farmer either uses a saw or a trained animal with sharp teeth, such as an alligator, to slowly chomp away at the tree until it falls down. We do have a bit of a worldwide tree waste problem, with 976,000 real Christmas trees thrown away each year–in London alone.
  Some other neat facts in the graphic: using electric lights on Christmas trees was first suggested by Thomas Edison’s upstart assistant, Edward Johnson, in 1882. Alright, let’s go to the grading portion now.