NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Check out the latest Christmas tree numbers and chances are you'll be a little sad.
By my reckoning, this year there will probably be more artificial trees in living rooms than natural ones. Heck, it may have already happened.
Somehow that gets me down. I just can't picture George Bailey having a plastic hunk of bristle decorated in the middle of his drafty old house. Like Charlie Brown knocking on the big display tree and hearing a metal clang ... it just doesn't sound right.
Now you could say I'm jumping the gun here. And, sure, more than twice as many real trees will get sold this year as fake trees.
But look at the sales chart and do a little arithmetic.
The life of a natural Christmas tree is about 30 days, give or take good watering. A fake one? Ha! For an average price of $68.80 in 2003 -- a little more than double the cost of a real one -- it'd better last at least two years, if not three. Add up the last three years and fake trees account for 24.3 million, just even with the projected range of real trees to be sold this year: 24.0 to 24.5 million.
This year the National Christmas Tree Association expects 6.1 to 6.6 million fake trees will be bought.
That seems a little light to me, since fake tree sales have been trending up (9.6 million sold last year), but we'll go with it. So our back-of-the-napkin estimate now becomes 23.6 million fake trees in use this year (purchased over the last three years) versus up to 24.5 million real ones. If only 900,000 families kept their fake tree from 2001, there's more fake trees than real ones out there.
Can we blame China? "That's where almost all of them (fake trees) come from," said Rick Dungey, a spokesman for the 1,500-member Christmas tree growers' group.
Yes, China's economic leverage in fake Christmas trees -- as in many other industries -- is readily apparent. The Christmas tree group's figures show that as more fake trees enter the market, the price goes down. But those plastic pines wouldn't be entering the market if there wasn't demand in the first place.
Sure I've heard the arguments for fake trees. Less mess. Less fire worries. Economical in the long run. Environmentally sensitive. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
First of all, many of those arguments don't hold true ... except maybe the mess one. Water your tree and it stays pretty fire resistant. Christmas trees are harvested like any food crop these days, so stop whining about the forests. And economics? Well, you get what you pay for.
When I was a kid we had a fake tree. For a while. After Thanksgiving Dad would sojourn up into the attic and bring down the dusty cardboard box. Then we'd merrily assemble the garish green plastic branches into the wooden pole. Every third one or so wouldn't fit just right and Dad would have to swear slightly and twist it in. Oh, what holiday fun!
But oh-the-horror when we gave up on the artificial fir and went for a real one. We had to go out, together, as a family, in the cold, no less. We had to shop, examine, debate and choose. Then we had to get the thing back home. And then, to top it off, it took a team effort to get the tree in the stand. Watered.
Yes, with the artificial tree you are buying cheap, long-run convenience in a cardboard box. That seems to be what people want these days. The real tree? You bought an experience. Often a family experience. But these days that seems soooo yesteryear.
Sigh. I'm going to go watch "It's a Wonderful Life" now. In black and white. Merry Christmas.
Allen Wastler is Managing Editor of CNN/Money and appears on CNN's "In the Money." He can be emailed at Wastlerswanderings@cnn.com.
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