An eastern red cedar for Christmas

Hello, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Back in the day, we’d go out to local farms to get our Christmas trees. Before the ubiquitous Fraser firs that don’t grow well here, many people got an eastern red cedar. We had a bamboo pole as tall as our ceilings, eleven feet, that we’d take with us to be sure our tree would be tall enough, and we would guy wire to keep it from tipping over. Our late friend Tony Melton said nothing was better for a Christmas tree than a ditch bank cedar --- it would have good foliage all around the trunk. Cedar trees have an incredibly prickly juvenile foliage; older ones, thankfully, are more scale-like. But even so, they were the devil to get into the Christmas tree stand. A contentious event, often with not-appropriate words involved.